Dancer, Jewel and Charlie …

I got to groom this lovely lady a bit on Sunday. She’s called Charlie and she lives with my mate Kim, a couple of miles down the road from me.

She’s a rescue. Just about all the critters who live with Kim came to her because they were having a very bad time where they had been. Sometimes Kim finds them, sometimes like this lovely boy,-cat they find her, he’s called Tom.

I used to live with ponies as a child and teenager and the first one who came to live with me looked very like Charlie, same bright bay colouring and same wicked-sweet expression but Jewel (her name) was an Exmoor pony so only 12 hand 2 inches and with a mealy muzzle unlike Charlie, who has a bronze nose and is 14 hands 2 inches. (A “hand” is 4 inches, the width of an average man’s hand.)

This is an Exmoor pony, not Jewel, so you can see the nose, this is how Jehanne’s pony, Dancer, looks to me when I see her in my mind’s eye as I write the stories. The only difference is that Dancer has a white star on her forehead – very unusual for an Exmoor – as my Jewel did.

When I first met Charlie several years ago she called to me in her mind, no whinnies just this big friendly ‘Hello!’ in mindspeech. With Kim’s permission, I went straight into her paddock and to her – slowly and carefully of course, keeping my aura well contained around me but reaching out a single friend-thread to her. She sent a friend-thread straight back to me, and they twined, the most delicious feeling, and she let me come right up to her, snuffled my fist with her lips and put up her head for a brow-scratch. It just sent thrills through me, to be connecting with a pony again after so many years, and she told me yes, she knew Jewel (who’s long passed over the rainbow bridge) and was with her now, saying hello to me again. I talk with Charlie most times when I visit Kim but last Sunday was the first time she was OK with me grooming her.

Rescue animals always have complex PTSD, as you may well know. It’s a given, how can they not when you know what horrors they’ve been through? So Charlie trusting me enough to let me groom her was a Big Deal for her, and for me too. When an animal trusts you to touch them, groom them, brush the mud out of their coats and scratch their itches, believe me, it’s Huge!

So Charlie gave me a reconnection again, and at a deeper level, to herself, to my old pony Jewel, and to Jehanne’s Dancer. Wow! What a gift. And you know? That’s all helping with writing Hollowbone.

The ponies, Jehanne’s Dancer and Jack’s Shadow, have quite big and important parts in the story, so the deeper I get to know them the better and Charlie’s helped with that. Without them, Jehanne would get completely stuck, unable to move forward at several points in the story. They’re familiar spirits so they know her very well, better than she knows herself as yet and so give her lots of tough love and good advice that can be hard for her to follow. Choices, always choices! Do you want to be your real self, or do you want to hide behind a fake and sometime wishy-washy version of yourself?

Jehanne had a near vertical learning-curve in Dancing with a Daemon and maybe she thought that had taught her everything … of course, it hadn’t! In Hollowbone she climbs the mountain all over again and literally at times in the Pyrenees, but she’s made to the top of a mountain before so she knows she can do it. She goes in full of confidence and fuelled by anger, she can do this thing and she will; she soon learns she needs yet more tools and skills to scotch this snake and she’ll have to acquire them on the job, as she travels to the climax of the story.

I’m beetling along with the book, writing every day and have the first draft done– Whee! So I’m on the first edit, going through it all again from the beginning, and not just tweaking words and language but realising where I need to add things or take them out. It’s the first refinement and there’ll be at least two more before I’m happy to send it off to my copy editor who will make sure it makes sense and is followable by my readers as well as catching all my typos!

She’s a brilliant editor, works for big companies as well as single authors, and I recommend her highly, if you want to work with her yourself catch her at Kristin McMillan-Stefanovic. Oh and don’t worry, yes she’s American but she’s good with British English too.

You can try a wee sample of Hollowbone here.