After a week of plodding through scenes that have been hard to write and hard to focus on, today I got into horses, coins, cash, auctions, and the unthinking racism of a people who have been one race, one culture, one language, and only five flavors of one religion for centuries stacked on centuries, and who live in a nation in which only they can be citizens, and in which they can only be citizens of the taak into which they are born unless they are invited to take citizenship in another taak due to some act of magnificent service or heroism.
Today the first drop in what will become a wave of foreigners to the Confederacy of Hyre hit the Tonk horsemarket in Beyltaak, to find that there are some horses only Tonks can buy. But this woman, this would-be buyer and Feegash diplomat, has to have one particular horse — a bay Tand mare (patterned on Arabians, for you fellow horse nuts out there.) This is one of the neater bits of foreshadowing I’ve ever done, because the diplomat really does have to have that horse, and the reason why is scary. But none of that is in this scene, except for me knowing what it means.
Light hand, I keep telling myself. Light hand — ride the book bareback with a hackamore and no one will ever complain that you led them around with spurs and a double bit. The story, ridden lightly, will take you on the best paths, will circle ’round the quicksand you can’t see, and will be less likely to falter over the rough ground.
This is some tough going, but I’m finding my faith in my gut again. Today has been good for me.
Oh … and my compliment for the day, courtesy of the Surrealist Compliment Generator, was Your sunburnt skin is as beautiful as gangrenous flesh peeled from an amputated limb. I look at myself and say, “Yeah, I’m in there.” How much better could anything be, I ask you?
(I got this one, too, but I’m not completely sure it’s fit to print — The expansion (and resultant rapid cooling) of your consecrated culotte sings the golden turnip with the mulatto touch-typist in my pants. So I think I’m going to get my consecrated culotte out of here before things get out of control.)
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