Not been a great week for writing. I only wrote about two days. Not much motivation.
I have been reading a fair amount. I downloaded the Hugo packet this last weekend. If you don’t know, the Hugos are awards that are given out for the best speculative fiction (primarily sci-fi and fantasy) at WorldCon each year. They are a big deal award. And if you have a supporting membership for WorldCon, you can vote. The supporting membership is something like 50-60$. You generally get all the short fiction (short story, novellete, novella) and a fair amount of the novel categories (best novel, best YA novel, best new writer, best series). It benefits the publisher to provide the books because being a Hugo award winning novelist means they are likely to sell a lot more books the next time something comes out.
I love it because I get to read a whole bunch of stuff I might not have picked up on my own. Though I was pretty proud that I already owned 3 out of the 6 nominated for best novel. Makes me feel like I’m keeping up with what the community is reading.
Mentally I designated Sunday as my day to post about horses stuff. I get to ride Uno on Saturdays and it seemed like a good day to both talk about that ride and how Scarlet did that week.
All best laid plans etc.
This week I skipped riding Uno because we planned to have our first post vax get together BBQ at our house with friends. I was ready to ride and make the time work for getting ready for the party in time but then started to stress. So I decided it was best to not and take some of the stress away. It was the better decision.
Scarlet’s been fine this week. Thursday he was a screaming asshole the entire walk. One of the codependent horses left their stall and their equally codependent neighbors lost it. All of them were screaming and so Scarlet said omg I need to panic too. I can’t exactly do anything to get him to stop that the way I used to. When he used to scream, I worked him hard enough that he couldn’t think about screaming. Can’t do that now. I tried backing him each time he screamed but that didn’t deter him. So we just walked with me pissy and my ears aching from his screams. I hate being that person with the screaming toddler in public.
Otherwise he’s doing fine. He’s walking better. Haven’t heard back from the vet though so I need to bug them as to why I’m not on the schedule yet. I’d still like to see what acupuncture and pemf will do right now. Other than that, its business as usual.
Been a while since I’ve done one of these but they seemed like a good post to do to get back into the swing of blogging.
Writing has been pretty hard while dealing with the depressive waves. I’ve been on a good track for a while now though and writing had still been pretty hard. I have been able to do it but I’ve had to kinda of trick my brain into it in some ways.
One way was in a discord group for writers, I found an accountability buddy. We decided to report to each other in a public channel each night what our progress for the day was. It could be words written, pages edited, outline done. Anything that was an actual forward movement. And that’s helped a lot. Its funny how “outside responsibility” can make you do stuff that you wouldn’t have done if the only person to be disappointed/care is yourself.
Another thing I did was I finally sat down and used an outline method to outline my current work in progress. I was getting stuck and started to hate my work. It’s a rewrite from something I did in 2018. The initial draft had characters who’s only purpose was to support the main character, plot holes and obscure motivations. In other words, it had problems. But I liked the characters, the magic and what I had originally wanted the plot to be. So I decided to rewrite it since I had a better understanding of the characters now. Surely everything would go better.
It did not.
I don’t know why I thought it would. Things never work out like you think. But when I got stuck this time, I used an outline method that I’d been introduced to that actually made a bit more sense for my brain than others had. Its Save the Cat Writes a Novel by Jessica Brody, if anyone is interested. Using that, a completely cleared off dining table and a ton of notecards, I managed to get a workable outline that seemed to have a plot and character arcs plus a good antagonist. So I’ve been able to progress.
My progress is mostly in little chunks but I’ve been writing about every other day, which is more than I have been doing for a long time. And I’m pleased with that.
The title definitely illustrates how I feel most of my life is going right now. This post even sat in my drafts folder for a couple of weeks with just the title.
Scarlet is doing fine. He’s doing great actually. It just doesn’t feel great because while he’s more or less healthy, I miss riding him. I miss doing more than walking him around the barn. I don’t think he minds. He walks around, gets to roll in the arena and then goes back to eating. I think the only more perfect retirement for him would be eating himself stupid on grass. But that would probably be bad for him cause he’d get fat and founder.
I digress.
Scarlet’s been doing well. We’ve been walking around the barn somewhere between 10-20 minutes, depending on the amount of time I have that morning. I had been slacking on walking him for the longer time for a while and I noticed that he started stumbling a bit more often. I definitely felt guilty and have made the effort to increase the time. He’s still interfering a bit more than I’d like with his hind so I called the vet to get on her schedule to give him another acupuncture and PEMF treatment. It’s been close to a year at this point I believe. I don’t know if its going to give him a boost with the interfering but he’s always felt pretty good after the treatments so I figured it was worth a shot. If it does, I’ll just have to keep in mind that he needs a tune up every half year or so.
Our new kitten. He’s about 5-6 months old now and is still adorable but in the asshole teenager stage of being annoying as F all the time.
One interesting thing that I’ve noticed while spending more time just grooming and walking Scarlet is that he’s starting to lean into scratches more. He’s never been a super expressive horse. The only place I ever knew that he loved getting scratched was his face. But now he’s started to ask for scratches in specific places.
I will be currying his neck and he’ll rock back or forward until I get to the one place that he wants scratched. That’s usually somewhere about 1/3 up his mane from his withers right in the middle of the mane. He started just trying to keep me scratching there but now he reaches his neck out and twists into the scratches. Which is adorable but my arms cannot actually hold up to scratching him for as long as he wants. I’ve got noodle arms. Need to work on that.
Another place where he’s been super loving the scratches is his groin. I put him back one day after a walk and he tried to reach around to scratch it himself. Unfortunately, he had to lift one leg to reach it and kept half falling. I pushed him away and was like fine I’ll do it. And he was so into it. When I start to scratch him he will spread his legs and lift his hips to give me the most access possible, as illustrated in the below photo. Its quite hilarious. I am loving that grooming is becoming more something he likes rather than something he just does.
He manages to stay up like this, which surprised me at first.
But that’s pretty much my days. 5-6 days a week, never giving him 2 days in a row off. He does fine with one day off but a successive day makes him come out a lot more stiff and less coordinated. I’m still riding Uno one day a week. I’ve got the budget for a weekly lesson as well, I just need to figure out where to go and when to do it. A second horse, lease or own, is a difficult thing to fit into the budget so it doesn’t look like an immediate thing. And that’s frustrating. Like I said, stasis.
The Horse Dream 