The Best Pony Clubbers in the Whole Wide World

I'm still trying to figure out if my pony club members are exceptional, or if I just see them that way.

A year ago I stood up at the USEA Meeting in defense of my kids. Somehow the open town hall meeting on the future of eventing had turned into a slog against kids-these-days, and pony club kids were singled out as being lazy, disinterested, and mounted on very expensive horses they were unable to ride. This went so against my experiences, against my children, that I got up and made some sort of speech. Looking back, I don't remember precisely what I said or exactly why I felt compelled to say it, except that keeping my mouth shut has never been one of my virtues. I do remember saying that based on my experience, if we want kids to be part of the eventing community, we have to offer them community. That what my pony clubbers have right now is each other, and that that has been the strongest force for good in our club.

Last year, a private donation let us bring the phenomenal Cathy Wieschhoff to our summer camp. Our camp is already the single favorite event on our calendar. The kids keep their ponies on my farm and sleep in my basement. In the evenings I show them where the showers are, feed them, and leave them alone. The first night they goof off. The second night they work. We hold our spring rating on the third day of camp, so the second night is one giant member-directed ratings prep, with everyone not rating either quizzing or cleaning tack for those who are. Moving the rating to camp may be the single best thing we've ever done, because it invests the entire club in the success of the tests. Each kid that passes is cheered and high-fived and group-hugged--and, because of that, we now have non-rating members showing up at our fall rating, too, just to pay back the love and the tack cleaning.

Anyway, here in the sticks we don't get a lot of world-class instruction, so when Cathy came to camp my kids were on point. They were neat and prepared and respectful, and they rode hard. They loved Cathy and she loved them. At the end of camp I told them if we wanted her back we'd have to raise a bunch of money. They got busy and raised it.

Our annual fun show, which we had a couple of weeks ago, usually gives us most of our operating funds for the year. This year, the entire membership worked as one--parents, too--from the 8-year-old who spent a long hot day resetting the trail class after each competitor to the grad student who came back just to work registration, from every single family pitching in for the concessions to the former club member who judged the show for free. We didn't make our operating funds for the year. We made our operating funds plus Cathy Wieschhoff returning plus repaying the testing fees for our new HA and HB members. Then we sold Yankee Candles so we'd be able to do even more fun things.

A couple of my older members came to me with a plan to revamp our unmounted meetings. One of my C2s has an idea about how to best prepare our C2s, all seven of them, for the C3 rating.

Oh, and last year my club worked Rolex. Only two of them had ever been to Rolex before. Most didn't really know what Rolex was. They do now. William Fox-Pitt tipped his hat to one of our younger members, who'd had a really crummy year up until then. He thanked her for her work and she'll never forget that, not as long as she lives. She went on to win her division at the D event rally. She has eventing stars in her eyes.

Best of all, as we were cleaning up from the horse show, I saw two little girls struggling to carry a heavy box between them. One of them was our newest member, just joined; the other, a child I didn't really know. "Thank you for helping," I said to her.

"Oh, I have to help," she said, earnestly. "I have to work. I'm gonna be in Pony Club."

A Little Riff on the Fourth Chapter of John

Jesus left Judea and went back to Galilee. The easy way to do that was to cut through Samaria, but Jews never cut through Samaria, they went around it. They hated Samaritans. Really, really despised them. Still, Jesus walked right through Samaria, making his disciples come along. They stopped in a city and the disciples went to find food. Jesus, alone, sat by a well. He was thirsty but didn't have a bucket. When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, he asked her for a drink. She was shocked that he would even talk to her, much less ask her for a favor. They talked for awhile, and then Jesus said this:
"...a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. 22 You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. 23 Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. 24 God is spirit,and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.”
25 The woman said, “I know that Messiah” (called Christ) “is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us.”
26 Then Jesus declared, “I, the one speaking to you—I am he.”
That's pretty significant, as there are very few places in the Bible where Jesus reveals himself as the Messiah. Usually it's important to look at the person to whom he is revealing himself. The disciples come back, surprised that Jesus is talking to this woman, but by now they've learned to keep their mouths shut at least some of the time. She goes and gathers all the village together, telling them about this person, this Messiah, and they go to Jesus and ask him to stay with them. So he stayed in their village for two days.

It's hard for us to really understand this in modern times, because Samaritan doesn't really resonate with us the way it would have with the ancient Jews and first Christians. But sometimes I see the antipathy many Christians have toward our gay brothers and sisters, and I wonder if the story couldn't be retold like this:

Jesus, walking from one side of New York City to another, chose to walk through a part of town where lots and lots of gay people lived. The disciples were a little wary--they'd been taught all their lives to despise gay people. Jesus stopped at a street corner. The disciples went into a little bodega to get some sandwiches. A woman came walking down the street, drinking water from a bottle. She had short spiked hair and a big GAY PRIDE button on her label; she looked like a lesbian. Jesus asked her for a drink.

The gay woman looked at him in shock and said, "You want a drink?" Then she noticed the cross around his neck, and the little fish pin on his lapel. She said, "But aren't you a Christian? I'm gay, I'm married to another woman, you're supposed to hate me. Won't you die of cooties or something if you drink out of my bottl?."

Jesus said, "Not only will I drink from your bottle, I want you to drink from mine. I'm here to bring salvation to everyone, even the people my disciples, in their ignorance and prejudice, despise. I'm here for all humanity. I'm God."

The gay woman went and found a bunch of her friends. She told them that it turned out they had a place in Christianity after all. The friends, grateful, asked Jesus to come and stay in their homes, meet their families, eat their food. Jesus did. And he brought his disciples along with Him, whether they liked it or not. 

My Passionate Love for Joanna Bourne

Since I went on at some length about why I couldn't get past page 2 of a historical fiction romance the other day, I thought I'd show the flip side (that's this week's theme) by going on at length about some historical fiction romances I love.

Anything and everything written by Joanna Bourne.

Her books have the cheesiest covers and the tackiest titles--well, not all, but really? My Lord and Spymaster? Blech. The Forbidden Rose? Okay, after that they're not so bad. The Spymaster's Lady. The Black Hawk. And, released on Tuesday, Rogue Spy.

I was so impatient for the release of Rogue Spy that not only did I buy it on Kindle (so I could get it immediately upon release day, and not have to wait for pesky mail delivery) but I was tempted to set my alarm for midnight just to read the first few pages. I didn't, because I know myself: I would have kept reading, straight through, and been a wreck the whole day. (Ask me about Harry Potter #7.) Then I had to drive to Knoxville on Tuesday with the horse--it took the whole day, my Kindle sitting in my purse just waiting for a moment when I had nothing to do--alas. In the evening, though, I dove into that book like you'd dive into a swimming pool on a sultry August day, with a run and a jump, deep and clean.

All of her books are set during the Napoleonic Wars, featuring at their core a group of British spies. The five books so far are not sequential--they weave in and out of the same time period so that the main character in one shows up as a side character in another. They're romances in that they feature adults in relationships, but they're character-driven with wildly intricate plots, crisp writing, and very solid history. (Not only can I not find mistakes, I usually learn something.)

It's not just me that thinks so. The Black Hawk won a passel of awards, and Rogue Spy has a star from Kirkus and a spot of the 2014 BBoTY list.

Here's just a bit. It's a senior spy talking to the two elderly aunts, themselves codebreakers, of our heroine, Cami, who's actually an imposter possibly working for the French:

Galba set his hands on the desk, making two temples of them. "Vi, much as I might like to hand her over to you and return to the status quo, you can't simply take her back to Brodemere in a handbasket. There are serious matters at stake. And a major complication."

"Which is?" Lily raised eyebrows.
"She has attacked and seduced one of my agents."
"Has she?" Lily said.
"It can't be much of an attack if he was in any state to be seduced afterward," Violet observed.
Lily murmured, "It seems so unlike her."
"The attacking or the seducing?" Violet asked.

"Neither." Lily frowned. "But doing it to an agent. So odd of her to become involved with a Service agent while she's fleeing...whatever it is she's fleeing. One does not seduce agents in the middle of a desperate enterprise. I don't understand at all." She turned to Galba. "Which agent? Not Hawker, surely. I would regret doing something violent to Hawker."

Galba said, "Paxton."
Lily exchanged glances with Violet. "Matters are a bit more serious,then."

The Flip Side.

Up until yesterday, in the two years that I've owned Sarah, my big grey horse, I had never been grateful that she did not have EPM. (For the Muggles: Equine Protozoal Myelitis, a very serious neurological disease spread by, of all things, possum poop.) That changed yesterday, when we concluded a four-hour examination at the University of Tennessee Equine Rehabilitation Center by injecting her hocks. (For the Muggles: treating a problem that's both very common and very likely to go away.) I spent the whole rest of the night feeling ambivalent about the election returns (I regard most politicians the way I do most possums, not bothering me in any personal way but somewhat icky all the same.) and very, very grateful that Sarah did not have EPM. We are all grateful today. Even the neurologists at UT were practically giddy when then turned Sarah over to the lameness crew.

So then I decided to look at the flip side of my year:

I was down in Florida in February, riding for two weeks in beautiful weather on beautiful farms, and being trained by two of the best eventers in the business, and that I have the opportunity to do that is nothing short of amazing. When Sarah showed slight--very slight--signs of lameness, some of the best equine vets in the country happened to be right there on the farm at the time, and did a full workup, and we found the problem right away. We were able to start treatment immediately. She immediately responded. Wow. My daughter got to join me for a few days, too, and we sang karaoke, and my daughter did not put the video on Facebook. I'm grateful for all of that.

My daughter acquitted herself well at the Pony Club National Championships. She has the quirkiest little horse in the world, and somehow they suit each other perfectly, and I'm still not sure how that happened. When I got knocked out, my daughter stepped up like a hero, keeping me from moving and also preventing the EMTs from cutting my safety vest off by showing them how it could be undone at the shoulders.

My parents were on hand, since they'd come to watch their granddaughter ride, and that meant that my mom rode in the ambulance with me, where she got to answer two questions (What happened? and Where's Sarah?) three thousand times. My dad brought my daughter once she'd taken care of the horses (with help from one of the HM judges, whose name we never knew). I've sometimes had a rocky relationship with my dad, and now I have the sweet memory of him getting a warm washcloth and washing the blood off my face while I was still semi-conscious. My mom and daughter alerted our network of family and friends, and the resulting outpouring of love was a huge comfort to me. My nephews insisted on Facetiming me so they could see I was really okay. Our lovely pony club friends took care of all of our tack and then left a soft comfort-food dinner for us in our hotel room (Soft for my injured mouth.). (My poor husband and son landed from an international flight, learned that I was in an ambulance en route to the hospital, and then had to turn off their phones for two hours while they went through customs, which was agony for them, but I'm always very grateful to them, too.)

I recovered from my head injury without incident. I had been wearing a helmet. My horse was fine.

My Holston Pony Club team was bloody brilliant at their event rally; I was so, so proud.

At this most recent horse trials, it was not snowing, as it was on our farm at home. My daughter had to ride on the first anniversary of a tragedy that shook her high school community to pieces, and it was very hard, and she persevered. Her dressage sucked, but her jumping was beautiful. Not adequate--beautiful.

Best of all, I listened to my horse. She was telling me she wasn't right, and I heard her, and I got off and called it quits. And then I was able to get help, good help, immediately. I live in the sticks, in the middle of nowhere, and it still amazes me that I can get to a nationally-ranked equine center in two hours. Sarah's the fourth horse I've taken to UT (seizures, suspensory surgery, eye ulcer) and every time I've come away grateful for the combination of veterinary knowledge and horse love shown by the staff there. For Sarah it was like a day at the spa. She was surrounded by people who pet her and loved her and gave her cookies, and only occasionally made her trot or poked her with needles.

I am grateful for my big grey horse and her goofy charm. I am immeasurably thankful for my family and friends. When you look at the flip side, 2014 was actually a pretty good year.

Vet, Ambulance, Vet: My Eventing Season in a Nutshell

To recap: I went down to Florida last February, and discovered that Sarah had injured her right hind annular ligament. Ultrasounded it 3 times, spent spring doing rehab. Recovered fully. Registered to compete at River Glen, but first took advantage of my daughter's attendance at USPC Championships/Festival to ride in some clinics myself. Got popped out of the tack, inconveniently landed head first, and spent over six times as much money on the ambulance ride to the hospital as I did on the CT scan once I got there. Sidelined for River Glen. Recovered. Went to the VA Starter Trials/Old Dominion Regional Event Rally, where in addition to being co-host of the rally, DC of a competing club, coach of a rider, driver and chaperone of a second rider, and mother of a third, I bopped around Beginner Novice because I was a little desperate to get back in the saddle/start box.

I had Book Stuff to do on other weekends this fall when I might have evented, so it came down to last weekend, the Virginia Horse Trials, to put some sort of pleasant ending to the season. My daughter was also competing, my husband came and brought out dog, and my friend Michelle had paid for a party tack stall, so it was all looking pretty fun, until Thursday, when Sarah threw one of her semiannual fits about hating dressage, or hating me being the boss of her, or both--whatever. She does have temper tantrums occasionally but they aren't that hard to weather.

Saturday, though--Saturday she didn't feel tantrummy as much as she felt unyielding. She was NOT going to be round, she would not relax. Our dressage has vastly improved since spring and I'd had pretty good hopes for our test, until about fifteen minutes beforehand when we were getting absolutely nowhere in the warmup. My coach thought her back end looked stiff. My husband said she wasn't steering correctly. I couldn't fix it, so I gritted my teeth and did the best I could, which was really stinking lousy. Bad enough that I got sympathy from the dressage judge. Her comments were, "Capable horse not on aids today. Nice effort. Good luck." If she'd been from the South she would have added, "Bless your heart."

I was pretty angry for a few minutes. I fumed and made faces and used bad words. But I had to show jump in an hour, so mostly I just changed tack and snuck out to watch my daughter ride her test. Then we went into show jumping warmup.

Now Sarah is a big part-draft grey mare, and she is more than capable of throwing a large-scale hissy fit. Some days when she gets mad, she actually stomps her feet. But she loves to jump, and she knows the Virginia Horse Park, and she loves to jump--show jumping wasn't going to be dressage, for sure, and it wasn't in that I felt how hard she was trying in warm up, but she was still tight through the jaw, neck, and back, and  she wasn't quite steering well through the turns, and her back end wasn't quite right and her jumps were off too. It was all subtle--no TD would have eliminated me--but it was wrong. I pulled up, concerned, and saw the same concern on my coach's face. She said, "She didn't look like this at the starter trials." I said, "She didn't feel like this at the pony club show last week." We looked at each other for another moment, and then I dismounted and ran up the irons. I thought maybe I was making something out of nothing, finding a problem when there was only a bad attitude, but I've been mistaken the other direction before and I won't do that again. I'd rather be cautious than stupid.

My trainer repeated that Sarah's back end looked funky. I had a chiropractor already scheduled for today, Monday. We came home. My chiropractor is also a vet, and he's convinced that Sarah's problems are neurological, not skeletal. We're drawing blood to test for EPM tomorrow.

So that was 2014: vet, ambulance, vet. I'll pin my hopes on 2015. I know it could be worse, but I'm hoping that it's better.

I can't read books like a normal person.

I wish I could. The other day, worn out and mentally tired,  I fired up my Kindle and bought a book called The American Duke. I like a slutty book about British nobles as much as anyone. However.

In the very first paragraph Lady Whatever wakes and decides to go for a walk in the ducal garden at dawn. She flings her cloak over her nightdress. I wince, Maybe they had nightdresses in 1812 for duke's daughters, (most women at that time would have slept in their shift, which was basically the bottom layer of what they wore during the day) but it's very hard to believe in a duke's daughter who go outside in one. She'd have absolutely nothing on beneath it. Okay. I move on. Lady Whatever slides her feet into her boots, and I wince again. What boots are these? No Wellies back then. Tall leather boots wouldn't slip. Most footwear she'd either need help to get into, or she would ruin by walking in the garden.

I've gotten to the second sentence and can barely stand to continue.

Lady W goes down to the garden dressed like a slutty farmhand and encounters her father, dead. She runs to the stables for help, and sits down on a hay bale.

Maybe it was possible to bale hay then. I don't know. But it would have been really rare, particularly in England where even now they don't really put hay up in the square bales common in America. Haystacks, people. Haylofts. Not hay bales. Sheesh.

Inside the house, Lady W's sister asks, if Papa is dead, who will be the next duke?

It's hard for me to express how wrong this is. Everyone knew who the heir would be. Everyone, all the time. In on of Jil Paton Walsh's Lord Peter Wimsey books, the Duke of Denver, Lord Peter's brother, drops dead of a heart attack. Lord Peter rushes over, and, as he's examining the body, a family retainer comes up to him and says, "Your Grace--" which is how you address a duke, because, now that his brother is dead, Lord Peter has become Duke of Denver, and everyone knows it immediately.

I realize the author just wanted a way to explain that this crummy American relative would inherit, but it didn't need to be done with inane dialogue spoken by incredible characters. '"Oh, no!" cried Lady Whosis, "now we're at the mercy of the dreadful heir!" It was true. Since the death of her second brother, her father's second cousin's child had become the heir. No one knew a thing about him.' See how easy that was?

I sigh deeply and try to persevere. But the next bit of what is still the first chapter explains how, since their family's descent into poverty, they've had very little to eat. Bullpucky. They live on a landed estate. Gowns, jewels, carriages, anything that has to be bought with cash, they well may not afford, but they've got plenty of food. If anyone in the area has enough to eat it's them.

I'm done. It's awful. I paid for the book and it's stuck on my Kindle; I can't give it away. I can't stand reading it. I know most people aren't like me, but I'm stuck with my neurotic attention to history and I simply can not go on.

(Fortunately, the next book I picked up was Sarah Waters' The Paying Guests. Now that's how to write historical fiction!)

Overthinking

I've been overthinking things with my new novel. I tend to overthink things, anyhow. My husband hates going to movies with me because I dissect them in detail on the drive home. Sometimes--often, actually--when I'm taking a riding lesson and stop to ask a complex question, my instructor says, "Kim. Shut up and ride." With novel-writing I'm even worse because 1) I have only myself to talk to; and 2) all first drafts are lousy.

I know this. I know that the first rule of writing is to get the crap on the page. I know that the magic mostly happens in revision. This will be my 17th book, for heaven's sake. I'm not new at the game.

And yet. I'm piddling, agonizing. What is this book About? Where's the Plot? As if I could ever answer those questions in a first draft. Get on with it, darling.

Yesterday I finished Katherine Paterson's new semi-autobiography, Stories of my Life. I adore Katherine Paterson. I still remember reading The Great Gilly Hopkins when I was quite young, and getting to the part where Gilly, a brat of a foster child, has given a handmade card to her African-American teacher. The front of the card reads, "They're saying 'black is beautiful,' but near as I can figure is that everyone who's saying it looks mighty like a-" and then the inside says, "person with a vested interest in maintaining that point of view." That line made me howl with laughter, probably 35 years ago, and it makes me howl now, but it also--way back when--it showed me a glimpse of how writing works, how you can manipulate words with fascinating results. I met Katherine Paterson once. I wanted to kneel and kiss her ring. I love her so, have always loved her so. So you can imagine my relief when I learned, in this last book, that the time between when she started writing seriously, and when her first book came out, was the same as mine: nine years. Oddly enough that nine-year figure crops up again and again in writer's biographies. It's almost as though it takes nine years to become any class of writer.

The book I'm working on now is the sequel to The War That Saved My Life. It's the first true sequel I've ever written. It's a bit easier to write a sequel, because I already know the characters and the setting, and I've done a lot of the research. But--I realize how self-aggrandizing this sounds--I keep getting good reviews for TWTSML, and they sort of paralyze me with regard to the current book. What if it sucks?

The answer is: of course it sucks. Keep writing.

For my last several books I haven't waited to finish a first draft before I sent it to my publisher. I've mailed off the first 70 pages or so, and mostly they've responded with enthusiasm and contracts. When I sent the first pages of the first draft of TWTSML, I got a concerned phone call from my editor, asking, "Is this really going to be your next book?" Translation: ain't nobody gonna publish that.

I sighed. "Yes, it is my next book," I said, "only, obviously, not quite in this form." I dumped the 70 pages into the trash and started again. And again. And again. Six drafts later, I finally found the main character's voice. From there it wasn't quite smooth sailing, but it was at least open water seas.

That's what I need to think about: the work, not the reviews. The story, and the work, and the inherent lousiness of every single first draft in the world.