It wound up being a very vetty day today. In the morning, had a quick tour of the Shaw pet hospital's equine surgical facilities so I could take a few photos for the vet book. Worked for a bit at home and then, this afternoon, Dr. Gaunt from Elk Lake Veterinary Hospital came by to have a look at Emma's eye. Seems she bumped it or got a hayseed caught in there somewhere... The end result was a pretty yucky looking eye. Since I'm busy collecting vets at work photos, I snapped away as Dr. Gaunt did all kinds of intereseting things to Emma's inflamed eyeball. Fortunately, Dad (who has a phobia about eye things) was positioned on the far side of the pony so he didn't have to see what was going on. I have some pretty juicy shots of the nasty-looking eyeball, but I won't post them here just in case visitors are surfing through while snacking.

The prognosis is good. We don't think there's an ulcer or major damage to the cornea. So, we're treating with anti-inflammatories, steroids, and antibiotics to reduce the swelling and get rid of the infection. With any luck and barring any further injury, she should be ok. Hopefully, she will be well on the mend by Friday, which is when I head out of town for my school and library tour in the Kootenays. 

 
Mikey, snoozing in a nest of hay. He has lost quite a bit of weight since his arrival here earlier this summer. You can actually see his ears now that they are no longer swallowed by excessive flub. A face only a mother could love... 

 
While searching for a photograph of Dr. Dobson and a horse in an MRI scanner at the vet hospital in Guelph (for the vet book), found this photo of me in my Pony Express uniform in Nevada. This is one of my all time favourite photographs, taken by publicist Jan Mansfield. I was riding up to one of the many schools we visited across the state, mochila slung over the saddle, letters from BC students tucked inside the mailbags ready to be delivered to Nevada students. These children were playing outside when I arrived on Breezy, the half-Arab mare we bought in Nevada to ride along sections of the old Pony Express trail. The children spotted us and dropped everything to race across the playground, yelling, "Hey, cowboy!" I still can't quite believe that we made that crazy trip.... it's only when I stumble across photos like this one that I know we really must have been there. 

 
My basic nature is somewhat disorganized (anyone who has ever seen my office will be laughing right about now and saying, "Somewhat?")... This does make it tricky to keep track of all the image files for the three photographically-enhanced books I'm working on at the moment. I have them stored on three different computers (don't ask) and even though I have done a lot of sorting and transferring and filing, there are hundreds and hundreds of images to keep track of. So, I've been going through the photo files, selecting and sorting, as I get closer to finalizing what's going into the current books and what might be useful for future titles (like the ploughing photo posted yesterday).

Anyway, while going through all these work-related photos, I was reminded just how many non-work images are sitting on my hard drives. So, I thought I'd start posting one a day here in a more or less random, disorganized fashion.

This first one is even kind of seasonal, being a bit creepy and Halloweenish. This is one of the scarecrows entered in the annual scarecrow-making contest down at the Historical Artifacts place... 

   Posting this photo for no particular reason except that the blog is more interesting with less blathering and more visual effects. So, this was taken at the Historical Artifacts Park during the ploughing demonstration held earlier this summer. I really would like to do a book about the heavy horses and those who continue to love them despite the fact they've become more or less obsolete... Hopefully all these heavy horse photos I've been collecting won't all go to waste!

There aren't that many show-stopping hazards for the average storyteller, but laryngitis would certainly be one of them. Today was the BC Teacher-Librarian Association conference and I had two appearances to survive - the first, a panel with four Vancouver Island authors (Karen Rivers, Sheryl McFarlane, Kit Pearson, et moi...) moderated by former features editor of the Times-Colonist, Carolyn Heiman. This wasn't too bad - was able to suck on cough drops, speak softly, let the others talk a lot. Next was a quick lunch (minimal chatting required) followed by an author signing (again, much cough-dropping, water sipping, nodding... and, I might add... not much signing - lots of authors, lots of teacher-librarians, but not a whole lot of book-buying going on! Of course... they must all already have my books! Yes, that's it.)

Anyway, feeling like my head was encased in one of those old-fashioned diving helmets and my voice threatening to disappear again completely, I had to take the stage in the theatre and deliver a performance of the Marriage of Sir Gawain... Much stress. Huge relief that the microphone worked. With an intervention from the Gods of Story I got through it, though having been unable to do my usual neurotic rehearsing, it wasn't as tight a performance as I would have liked... And the venue (blinding lights shining in my eyes so I couldn't see the audience) was not the best for delivering a top notch performance. Storytelling is a very interactive, malleable, flexible kind of thing and when you can't see if the eyelids in the audience are open or drooping, it's hard to connect with the listeners.

The feeling is a bit like being alone in a shower and holding forth about something or other and then realizing there is actually nobody listening and having this horrible moment of self-consciousness that closes the throat and sets me to humming some inconsequential tune in a feeble attempt to reassure myself that I'm not losing my mind. This doesn't usually happen during a storytelling performance because when things are going well and I can see my audience properly, there's a lot of give and take - a conversation of sorts is going on so I really don't feel like I'm talking to myself.

But today, the strange combination of feeling a bit cut-off from everyone else in the room and having consumed far too much Tylenol and Echinacea and not doing my usual vocal warmups (with no voice, it seemed a bit pointless and I was seriously worried that I would use up whatever voice I might have had left) the whole thing was a bit of a psychadelic experience. As a final aside, it is very strange that this audience dissociative disorder doesn't really happen during a stage play - not just becuase usually one doesn't stand up there on the stage doing a very long monologue, but also because there's a script, whereas the story is a very fluid beast that can turn on the teller when the teller is feeling a little under the weather. I am guessing the feeling is more like hanging yourself out to dry as a stand-up comic - something I've always wanted to try but dread so much I've never bothered.

Good grief - what a ramble. After all that, came home and mucked out the paddocks, fed the horses, and then collapsed on the couch to sort of listen to the hockey game. I say sort of because I kept falling asleep. Did rouse myself to vertical position to hear the last 5 minutes of the game, followed by a heart-stopping 4:59 worth of overtime. And I'm glad I did because my beloved Canucks managed to pull out the win with only .7 of a second left to go!!!!!! Thank you, Sami Salo - you rock my world!

All of this was followed by an absolutely delicious dinner prepared by Dad who, entranced by France, cooked some scrumptious beef/onion/garlic/red pepper-laced rich sauce served up with herb-crisped roasted poatoes. Yum!

You won't believe what arrived in my mailbox today! A small package, lumpy and bizarre-feeling, containing - ta-da! - a hoofpick signed by none other than the amazing Gail Greenough. Just in case you are not falling on the floor with astonishment, here's a brief bit stolen from Wikipedia about Ms Greenough...

Gail E. Greenough (born March 7, 1960) is a Canadian equestrian. She was the first woman, the first Canadian, the first North American and the youngest person ever to win the World Show Jumping Championships. Greenough was champion in 1986 at Aachen, riding a horse called Mr T (Hann). In 1990, she was made a Member of the Order of Canada.

Wow. Just wow. And how did this amazing treasure (which, btw, will never go anywhere near the filth inside a horse hoof...) wind up in my mailbox? Turns out my sister, Tonya, is doing a little barn work where the illustrious (can you tell she is one of my heros? heroines?) Gail Greenough herself rides... I can only think that Tonya slipped the appropriate horse an extra-big carrot... or swept the outside of a certain stall extra thoroughly... or squirreled a crisp $50 in the right grooming box... Do I care exactly how this came to be? Not really. So thank you thank you thank you Tonya! And thank you thank you thank you Gail Greenough!

So what could be harder than cutting 30% out of a manuscript? How about getting rid of everything EXCEPT 25%? Yup, that's the situation in which I find myself with the Karen Brain biography. So I'm diligently taking my 180 page manuscript and hacking away at it so I am left with approximately 45 pages. This so we can include plenty of photos throughout without breaking the bank. The length will actually wind up being very similar to the BTS books and will definitely put the finished book firmly in the land of books for 8-12 year-olds.

The good news is that Sono Nis would like me to do a second version of the biography, for adults and teens. The bad news on that front is that the original 180 pages are written for a younger audience and the manuscript isn't really long or detailed enough to satisfy an adult reader. I'll have to go back to my original interviews to pull out more details, conduct more research/interviews, and then have another crack at the longer book. In related (nearly awful) news, I came into the living room the other day only to discover the dogs had gone through my briefcase. For whatever strange reason, they decided that my digital voice recorder and [expensive!] Sony microphone were snack-worthy... Shards of digital debris everywhere! LUCKILY - I think I have everything downloaded from the recorder as I can't get anything to turn on and even if I could get any kind of turning on action, there is no data screen left! Also fortunate, the batteries were wedged in pretty tightly so even though the criminal hounds had removed the battery door, the batteries only show a couple of superficial tooth marks but no battery acid was consumed.

All of this trauma makes me very, very glad that I always take copious notes during an interview, just in case of equipment failure just like this!

So, how much cutting have I done so far? Not quite enough, but impressive nonetheless. Karen is post-op and about to move into Parkwood Rehabilitation Hospital and I'm only on page 48! So, the last section (recovery and getting to the Olympics) will be handled in the next section and that will give me a much reduced new first draft to work with. The next sweep should get me pretty close to where we need to be lengthwise for the draft that will [finally] get to my editor, Laura Petoum, in Toronto. For the short version, anyway. It looks like I'll be agonizing over the longer book for a while yet. Sorry. But if I have to suffer like this, it only seems right that blog-readers share my pain!

Of course, I couldn't send my only child off into the world without a hug... and a project. Visit Where is My Hug? and follow the progress of the hug I sent off around the world... The idea is to keep passing the hug along until it gets all the way around the planet and back to me! This is my small gesture in aid of world peace. I wonder who will bring my hug back home?

Whew! A busy few days getting Dani ready to head off for Dani's Big Adventure in Tokyo! (You can follow her progress at Dani's travel blog...).

Happy Thanksgiving!
Spent the morning at work on the Karen Brain biography (more on THAT when I'm not quite so tired), the afternoon working on Ringo (one of my horses currently in training), and the evening feasting at the Canoe Club. Who says salmon isn't an appropriate Thanksgiving menu item? Here on the mellow west coast, anything goes. Late evening spent adding more books to my LT catalogue - now over 600 titles, but who's counting?

In my last post I mentioned some slashing and hacking happening in the BTSAT Racetrack book. It may sound a bit dramatic to be chopping out a third of the book, but it's actually pretty normal. We cut at least that out of Jo's Journey, a way more difficult task as that was a work of fiction and it's kind of tricky to excise big chunks of a story without things feeling rushed or choppy. In the case of Jo's Journey, we needed the length to fit within the Orca Young Readers format. These are short novels with a large typeface intended to encourage readers who may still be feeling a little intimidated by fat novels. The books also include a few interior illustrations. Interestingly, Orca doesn't restrict content or vocabularly, so these aren't really hi-los, but rather, they're just short. Granted, in a short, short novel there isn't a whole lot of room for sub-plots, but it's amazing what one can fit into a little book like that.

The Behind-the-Scenes book is being cut for slightly different reasons. F&W is publishing the book in full colour with lots of photographs. The design is also supposed to be nice and open, with lots of white space on each page, plenty of sidebars and so on. I can't tell you how delighted I am with these decisions. A non-fiction book for horse-loving kids should have lots of photos of horses and horse stuff... and these days, black and white just doesn't cut it any more. Neither does a cluttered design with great long blocks of dense text. The plan for the book is all fine and dandy aesthetically speaking, but there are very real fiscal restraints at work. The cost of printing a full colour book, even offshore, is high and the costs rise with each signature added. Meanwhile, back at the retail end of things, there is only so much a consumer will pay for a book. If the book is for children, that amount drops. So..., despite the fact my original manuscript (pushing 100 pages) went down very well (remember an earlier post in which I said the editor felt we could proceed directly to the copyedit?) it was just too long.

Rather than slashing whole chapters (that would have been too easy!), I pruned the designated 30% evenly from the entire text. The first 5-10% was easy - most manuscripts easily contain that much fat in the guise of adjectives, repetition, passive verbs, and sentences that can be easily rewritten. The next pass was a little tougher - that's when each sentence is examined to see if it is really necessary, how much it adds to the text, if there is some way to combine one section with another to get the same information across. Another 10-15% was lost with that kind of process. The final cuts were hardest (by this time, I'd already lost 25 pages from the manuscript and it really felt like there wasn't anything else to lose!). Red pen in hand and bandaids close by, back through the manuscript I went again, removing some stuff I really liked but which wasn't, strictly speaking, absolutely necessary. On this draft I did quite a bit of shifting of information out of the body text and into slightly longer captions, getting rid of any duplication that might have existed between the captions and the text. The final section (additional resources) I cut completely, thinking that perhaps we could incorporate that into a teacher guide or on the website (which reminds me, I must get Dani to add a new section to my website. She has been busily re-designing it as the design was really looking pretty old and tired).

So at the end of it all, I have a much leaner manuscript that still has plenty of information for kids curious about life at the racetrack. Now we'll see what the editor thinks!

Ok... I have developed a serious new addiction... Cataloguing my library. I justify this activity by telling myself that I really should root out my duplicates and pass them along to worthy causes, but really, I am just having a blast going through my shelves, discovering old friends, dipping, browsing, stroking, and perusing.

If you, too, feel the need to tackle the stacks and stacks of books with which you are surrounded, set yourself up over at LibraryThing, possibly the best site to distract me in years. I'm trying to figure out a way to link my library to this blog... if you don't see an assortment of covers anywhere around, head over to library thing and search for BiblioFool - that would be me! Say hi. Start entering your library...

In case you are one of my editors, I only engage in data entry AFTER I've done my actual real work for the day... Fear not! Managed to cut the track manuscript by 30%, as requested. Hack. Slash. Gut. All in a day's work!

Ok... after a bit of fiddling and testing, it seems like if you click on any of those covers up there you will be taken to amazon where you may purchase said title (so you can then catalogue said book in your library and we will have a book in common and, as it happens, I will make a teeny weeny commission...). Click on the words 'my library' in green, and you will be taken to, yup, my library over at Library Thing where you can poke around through the books I've catalogued so far (I broke 500 this evening). See you in the stacks!

Visitors to the Mary Winspear Centre in Sidney made pom-poms with Coast Salish knitter, May Sam. The artwork in the background is by Joan Larson and was used in Yetsa's Sweater. 

Sylvia Olsen modelled some fine items of Cowichan knitting during a presentation to students from Deep Cove Elementary School. Her antics were part of the weeklong book launch of Yetsa's Sweater. May Sam, seated nearby, shared her own stories of learning to clean the fleeces, card, spin, and knit the wool during a lifetime spent working with wool. Children learned to make pom-poms in the same style that May made them when she was little. The artwork hanging in the background is by Joan Larson, the illustrator for the book. The machine peeking out from behind Sylvia is a spinner, made from a modified treadle sewing machine.

Chasing the Moon is Penny Chamberlain's new work of historical fiction for young readers. I mention it here while wearing my Freelance Publicist's hat to let everyone know to attend the book launch this weekend.

Details:
Sunday, October 1st
1-4pm
Mary Winspear Centre
Victoria, BC

Penny's book is one of two being featured in a weeklong series of school visits, public displays, signings, and launches organized and hosted by Sono Nis Press (the second book is Sylvia Olsen's new picture book, Yetsa's Sweater - I'll post a cover scan in a minute). Big publishers take note! This kind of all out support and promotion of new titles is rare, rare, rare and is yet another reason why I appreciate the work of Sono Nis. The books are gorgeous and Diane Morriss throws herself behind every title she produces. She really is the heart and soul behind the 'little press that could' even when the publishing industry in Canada suffers its share of troubles.

And here it is, Yetsa's Sweater by Sylvia Olsen and illustrated by Joan Larson (the same artist who will be doing the new StableMates covers, in fact!) Yetsa's Sweater is a lovely book about the tradition of making Cowichan Sweaters. Sylvia's launch will be on Thursday evening (Sept. 28th from 7-9 pm) at the Mary Winsear Centre. May Sam (the model for the grandmother in the illustrations) will be on hand doing some sweater-making demonstrations. Yetsa (Sylvia's grand-daughter) will be there being both cute and famous, and Joan Larson (along with a selection of her artwork) will also be in attendance. Come one, come all! Should be a great time... If I get myself organized, I'll take photos and post them here, so you can see what you're missing! 

Can you identify this bird? A raptor is about as much as I know... The photo was taken above a vineyard near Cobble Hill on Vancouver Island earlier this year (they day we took Dad out for a tasty wine-enhanced lunch for Father's Day). I'm mostly uploading this as a test of my internet connection from my laptop and apparently the most recent photos stored here aren't that recent. I kind of like the photo, though - I got quite dizzy the day I took it as I was sort of stumbling along with the camera pointed straight up, one eye closed, the other peering through the viewfinder, trying to catch the bird as it soared above me... Hmmm... that really doesn't sound good, does it. Seriously, I only had a very small quantity of wine... not really enough to result in stumbling across the vineyard, dizzy and unable to identify the local birds. 

One of the (many, many) strange things about life is its persistent nature. After someone dies, life keeps on going for everyone else even though it seems impossible that this could be true. I know, every armchair philosopher on the planet has mulled over this whole mortality business - but I must say that despite knowing my mother's death was coming (she was ill for a long time), the finality of her passing has left me in a bit of a surreal daze.

This was not helped at all by a peculiar moment today at the Threshing Festival at the Historical Artifacts Park down the road. Dad was volunteering there and I popped in to say hi and check out all the cool steam-driven engines that were hissing and chugging and clanking and whooshing away...

The museum is a pretty cool place to hang out - very casual, lots to see. The model train people also use the property and they had their small trains running (large enough for people to sit on, though the engines barely come up to my knees). At some point, I started wandering around in the hidden corners of the place where the as-yet-unrestored bits and pieces of machinery, old wagons, tools, sawmills, ploughs, and other amazing stuff are stuffed into sheds and barns and shelters and I had this flashback to driving around to old farms in Alberta with Mom.

She spent hours and hours and hours poking around decaying homesteads, photographing rusty ploughs and rotting vehicles and I started seeing things completely differently.

Next thing I knew I was grovelling around underneath some horsedrawn carts, snapping away, having something like an out-of-body/not-my-memory experience as I imagined what Mom would have photographed had she been there.

These wheels are part of the series photographed while I was feeling a little lightheaded...

New author photo?
Well, it's been quite a week... With our family gathered from all corners of the globe, it wasn't long before someone suggested we dig out the boxes of old photos (my mother was quite the photographer, so we have lots and lots and lots of pictures to look at!). This one of me was taken in Surfer's Paradise in Australia in about 1967. I'm looking pretty stylish, don't you think? I'm thinking it might work as an author photograph....