Horses of the Arrowstar Series: Marmalade, Toast, Syrup and Buttermilk, the burro

I’m an urban cowgirl with imaginary horses. There are 32 acres of Arizona ranchland in the southeastern corner of Arizona I call my own, but I don’t own a horse or ride one on a regular basis. Not long ago I wrote a blog titled What if You Must Write What You Don’t Know?  In spite of not being able to claim the elite title of Arizona Cowgirl, I’ve created characters who fit that mold very well. Kat owns a ranch she inherited from her grandmother and at one time trained to be an Olympic equestrian. Star, on the other hand, has always wanted to be a cowgirl, but like me grew up in the city. Now that she’s moved to Arizona, she’s going after that dream by taking riding lessons from her friend Kat. Both Ricki and Jim Kane grew up in ranch country and have been riding since they were kids.

There is a mystique about horses and riders that sends our thoughts roaming into the western landscape. I believe characters who choose animals as companions express depths of compassion and caring readers appreciate. These horse-country dwellers have a certain toughness and confidence about them. After all, they not only ride their horses, but know how to rub them down after a long ride, brush out their tails, saddle and bridle them and make sure to feed and water them properly. Not to mention having the knowledge to tend to their ills and have the good sense to call the vet only when it’s warranted. My granddaughter who rides the “range” up north in the state of Washington tells me that a truly accomplished rider not only masters all the equestrian skills, but cares for her horse as well, including feeding, watering and mucking out the stall.

I’ve schooled myself in various ways in order to write about horses and cowgirls. Many years ago I earned the horsewoman badge in Girl Scouts by attending camp where I learned to ride using either a Western or an English saddle. Before the badge became my trophy there were plenty of chances to master quite a few of the above-mentioned skills. Unfortunately, when camp ended, so did my association with the horses. Of course, I’ve participated in trail rides over the many years I’ve lived in Arizona, but I would never answer the question, “Do you ride?” with a resounding, “Yes.”

I have a good friend who has owned, ridden and cared for horses her whole life. She kindly took me out to West World in Scottsdale to watch a competition in the huge covered performance arena there. Walking the dusty path between the stalls while kicking up dust that settled on our boots and jeans, we talked about the joys and also some of the hard realities of horse ownership. That day gave me a feel for the cost, the time and the effort that goes into this popular, but somewhat daunting pastime.

Having heard in the news about horses used by drug runners in Mexico and Arizona that often are abandoned in the desert, I researched this growing problem. Considering the cost of keeping a horse healthy and well fed, it’s a credit to the groups taking them in that they’re able to operate at all, barely surviving on donations and volunteer help. In Charade the second book of the Arrowstar series, having Star find Syrup the horse she desperately wants to adopt among a group of those rescued horses, seemed like a good way to highlight this little- known effort to rehabilitate and adopt these horses out to caring owners. Ricki’s horse Marmalade and Jim’s horse Toast turned out to be part of the glue that brought Ricki and Jim together in Arrowstar the first book in the series. After all, if you’ve got toast, you definitely need marmalade!

The Storm Women, the new Arrowstar release in October 2014, introduces a little gal called Dusky to Buttermilk the burro. In the aftermath of a very difficult time, Dusky’s aunt claims, “In a way, I think that colt saved little Dusky,” Sarah told Margaretta as they worked side by side in the garden, keeping an eye on Dusky as she mucked out Buttermilk’s stall in the small barn behind the kitchen house. And perhaps Sarah is right about that, but I’ll let you decide as you turn the pages of this new addition to the Arrowstar series.

The nitty-gritty details of ranching, horse training and care come, as usual, from sites dedicated to horses on the Internet. Here are some links you might want to investigate if your interests run to horses and the hardy souls who love them:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/31/us/31horses.html?_r=0 – Horse Rescue

http://www.westworldaz.com/#about – West World

http://www.twisterheller.com/index.htm - Horse Ranching in Arizona

http://gingingray.wantlesspower.com/HorseColors.html - Kinds of horses

http://www.equisearch.com/article/show-skills-for-every-horse - Horse riding and training

Read on! Ride on! Write on!

Cheryl

Author Biography – Books – Blog - Twitter

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Are Petunias Lonely?

Some of us are old enough to remember the song that goes, “I’m a lonely little petunia in an onion patch, an onion patch, an onion patch – Oh, won’t you come and play with me?” by The Happy Gang. Writers spend lots of time in the onion patch trying to make their words bloom into pages of prose their readers will enjoy and possibly even treasure. When a petunia sprouts in the garden, it needs nurturing of all sorts like watering, fertilizer and maybe even a few whispered endearments to help it grow and eventually bloom into its deep purple, blue, pink, or red glory.

Novels, like petunias, need all kinds of nurturing, too.  Books need T.L.C. delivered by writers, publishers, and promoters before landing in the laps of readers. Writing a novel, I’m quickly finding out, represents only one quarter of the effort it takes to bring a novel to a reader. Three-fourths of the effort to catapult a book into the hands of the public goes to formatting and marketing.

If most “indie” (independent) authors are like me, they would much rather be putting words on paper than struggling with fonts, gutters, front matter, back matter, sizing, pricing and selling. Launching the Arrowstar series on October 1 in both print and e-book format across many electronic platforms and through many print distributors often seems to me like being smack-dab in the middle of “an onion patch!” Some days I find myself wanting to pick up my petals, hike up my leaves, and run screaming from the garden! And then I think about the quote that I always include at the end of my emails, “Take a chance; amaze yourself.”

Being a lonely petunia probably doesn’t describe most writers, because, after all, we have our characters to keep us warm. But, the gritty art of writing does tend to be a very solitary occupation. What balances the hours and hours sitting solo in front of a computer screen? I believe some of that balance comes from reading reviews and comments written by fans. Readers’ opinions are highly valued by authors. Constructive criticism might lift a writer out of a writing rut, and praise certainly urges a writer onward.

The next time you finish a book that made you smile or brought you to tears, think about taking the opportunity to write a review or make a comment. It’s not easy out here in the onion patch! Your favorite authors will be thrilled to hear from you.

To receive announcements about new releases, sneak peeks, and insider tidbits, won't you please share your email address using the form provided (at top right). Your address will never be sold or shared. That’s a promise!

  

Read On!

Cheryl  

Writing Time Passing

I get tangled up in numbers when I’m writing. I ask myself questions like the following:

How old would that character be in 2014?

When did that happen in the first book in the series?

What day would it be now if three days have passed?

The baby is born in a certain year, was my character still young enough to give birth?

What was the date the baby was born?

How many years have passed since the time frame of the last book in the series?

How old would the baby and the mother and father be in this book?

Is the kid old enough to be a toddler now?

How late in the 20^th Century did criminals rob trains?

Is my character too young to have been a train robber?

How old is my character anyway?

When I first started to write, one of the hardest techniques to master was the passing and tracking of time. I still have not mastered it! I have to be ever so vigilant to keep my characters from stepping out of their own personal time zones.

Here's at least one device I have mastered, the three dots, asterisks, or whatever cute curlicues a writer chooses to put between paragraphs that free the reader from living though the tedious details of time passing. For instance, the writer can avoid writing, “She pulled her chair back from the table, put on her coat, walked out the back door, and ran into the road. She walked and walked and walked down the dusty track until three days later when she came to her daughter’s house in the woods.”

Instead, I can let the reader imagine that the character got up from the table, walked out the door and made it to her daughter’s house by simply putting three asterisks between the paragraphs where she left and the one where she arrived. The graph following the asterisks for instance can begin with a conversation she’s having with her daughter. They can talk about the dusty track and the strain of walking so far in so many days if the reader needs to know. If not, the story continues with more interesting details.

The real reason I can’t keep track of what day it is in my stories could be that personally I really don’t care. However, I’m fairly sure some and maybe most of my readers do want to know. Lately I've had pretty good luck making all parties my characters put on take place on a Saturday night. The rest of the week I just let float by with references to sleeping, waking, traveling, and eating meals. I’m hopeful this ruse works and if the reader really longs to know if it’s Monday or Thursday then they can figure it out for themselves.

Actual years are much trickier for me. I’m constantly referring back to the previous book in the series to make sure I keep the time frame straight. It’s annoying and interrupts my writing flow. I do keep a list of dates, places, and characters close at hand on the computer, but it needs to be more extensive. Secondly, I think when I write A Train Robber’s Tale, I’ll expand and print that list so I won’t have to leave the page where I’m writing to find out facts I need to know quickly.

When someone says writing is not magic but a craft to be mastered, I believe it. However, when I read back over something I've written, sometimes I’m amazed at where my imagination has taken me. Often I ascribe the writing to the characters who evidently must be whispering in my ear. On my own I couldn't possibly come up with all these wonderful written images that make a novel.

I’m hopeful I’ll learn to better handle the speed bumps of writing that involve numbers, dates, lists and calculators. In the meantime, I hope my readers will make up for my lack of mathematical genius, and puzzle things out for themselves or just plain forgive me.

Think about this: Writers adore readers, so consider posting notes often. Be gentle.

Read On!

Cheryl

Keep an eye out for The Storm Women in print and as an e-book soon on Amazon.

(Also available on other e-book platforms along with others in the Arrowstar series)

An Insiders’ Tour of The Storm Women

As you probably know by now if you’ve been reading the blog, The Storm Women is a companion book to the second novel in the Arrowstar series Charade. The women of the Storm family inhabit the pages of Charade, but in limited cameos. This companion novel builds on those cameos and traces the Storm women’s ancestry back to Margaretta Storm just as she begins her dancing career at the tender age of 23 in 1857. The life stories of five generations of Storm women, as told through the historical fiction of Star Lance, traverse the Civil War years of the 1860s, and chronicle the births of the Storm family’s daughters in 1859, 1861, 1888, 1890, 1915, 1935, and 1961.

Spoiler Alert: To fully savor Charade without ruining its secrets, it would be wise to save reading The Storm Women for dessert.

Just in case there is any doubt, Star Lance is the protagonist of the Arrowstar series. Star not only owns an antique store, but writes historical fiction novels as well. The Storm Women is her second novel, and I’ve chosen to give her credit with an author tag on the book’s cover that reads c. k. thomas with star lance. I hope fans of Arrowstar and Charade enjoy reading this “bonus” book just as much as the first two books in the Arrowstar series.

From my Thomas Family History on Ancestry.com, I’ve taken the liberty of using some women’s names from my own family line. My paternal grandmother hailed from the Horton clan and among the women of the clan I discovered Almanza J. Kirkham (Stormy) and Ladoska Anna Horton-Partlow (Dusky). Fascinated with these monikers from another era, I continued to mine the gold of family given-names to round out my cast of characters for The Storm Women: Sarah Swing-Horton, Carrie Edna Horton-Thomas, Opal May Horton (who lived to be 100!), and Margaretta Belle Horton-Purvis (who sadly died at 25).

These women’s lives, whose first names I have “borrowed,” have absolutely no resemblance to the women in my story. However, using their names has reminded me of the huge debt of gratitude I own to my ancestors for surviving, so that I might have life. It makes this story feel just a bit more alive to me. While I’m sure there are traits I have that I wish they had not passed on to me, I’m equally sure I’ve benefitted more from  strengths I’m bound to have inherited from them.

The Storm women are a fierce and independent lot fueled with ambition, fortitude, conviction and some all-too-familiar failings. I hope their characters reflect what it means to be women of passion, determination and perseverance. What a romp it has been watching them live their complex lives, crying with them in the night, and smiling broadly when they triumphed.

Watch for The Storm Women coming soon in e-book and in print on Amazon.com

An entreaty to consider: Women, pay homage to those who have paved the way.

 Write On!

Cheryl

Stalled Writing The Storm Women

I’m sitting on the back patio watching the goldfinches decorating the thistle-seed feeder and the hummingbirds dive-bombing each other for rights to the sugar water. The water dripping from dish to dish in the Mexican fountain makes a soothing background for thinking. It’s 88 degrees already at 7:45 a.m. in Phoenix and there’s not a breath of air moving across the glassy surface of the swimming pool.

Margo Storm has me stumped for the moment and even though it doesn’t look like I’m doing any work on the novel right now, I am! I’m ruminating. At about 50,000 words into the novel, I’ve decided to go back to the beginning to insert Margo’s present-day story between each of the chapters chronicling the lives of the women buried in the Storm family’s cemetery plot.

Beyond the ruminating, one other maneuver I’ve employed to extract myself from this stall involves reading stories other novelists have written. Even though I sometimes feel guilty about taking time out from the writing, I think it’s a necessary practice to reset my imagination. Sitting out here reading, watching the birds, the sky and the clouds, opens up my world beyond my computer screen. Themes and devices running though other writers’ stories inspire me to think more broadly about the one I’m writing.

Pausing to let myself enjoy the life going on around me helps banish the fear that looms large when words and ideas refuse to flow. While reading, I’ve been reminded of a theme that will fit into Margo’s life perfectly. Now I’m onto some new directions for Margo’s character and new insight into how to make her life the ongoing chain that links the lives of all the Storm women.  Now, to get on with it!

I thought of a quote this week to share with you : “Boredom is the soil of creativity, inspiration its seed and imagination its flower.” Cheryl Thomas

Write On!

Cheryl

When Characters Hijack the Outline

Today I took a look at the outline for the final chapters of The Storm Women. Last week I finally put Chapter 14 to bed and found that the Chapter 15 outline takes the story places my characters no longer want to go. I rather guiltily deleted the Chapter 15 outline in its entirety and began writing the following chapter without losing the basic thread of the story.

The question facing me now, “Does an outline help or hinder the writing of a novel?” I’ve heard some authors say they wouldn’t think of writing without an outline, and others who feel constrained by using one. Of course, I expected changes in the outline would emerge, but not so drastic as to cause the demolition of an entire chapter. And I have a feeling much more dismantling is yet to come.

Now that I’ve gotten to know Opal better, I can see the story playing out in a much different way than I’d planned when I wrote the outline.  Secondly, each of the elements in the outline take many more words to express than I imagined. And third, as the characters reveal themselves, their personalities begin to dictate the plot line.

I recently read that it’s not good to worry about the plot too much, but rather to let the characters actions and personalities reveal the story’s direction. It seems this gradual process gets sidelined when a predetermined destiny is spelled out in an outline. Here I thought I’d done a great thing by actually finishing an outline for this novel. Previously I’d get only halfway into a novel’s outline and maybe that’s not such a bad thing after all.

Defining my writing process has proven to be much more complicated than I originally anticipated. I’ve developed a style, but I’m still struggling with the best ways to approach the writing. I’m really annoyed with my characters for running amuck of my precious outline!

Tidbit: Giving up is not an option.

Saddle Up!
Cheryl

What if You Must Write “What You Don’t Know?”

“Write What You Know” has been drummed into my head by teachers, magazine articles and books about writing since I got the bug to write years ago. Now one of my characters has escaped from Arizona to the heart of Los Angeles. She arrives in 1955 to make a mark in the music industry. Here I am trying to write “what I don’t know.”
  
I’m making headway in becoming familiar with the landscape where my character, Opal, walks, lives, and works. Can you believe I’ve found videos and photos from the 1950s on the Internet? One of Opal’s closest friends lives in the area known as Bunker Hill, and I’ve viewed a driving tour around those streets that was filmed in the 1940s.
  
This area wasn’t a victim of urban renewal until the early 1960s, so the buildings I’m seeing in the video would have survived into the 1950s. It’s a place where old Victorian houses reside among brick and mortar apartments and hotels. There are drug stores, dry cleaners, small grocery stores and other mom-and-pop businesses conveniently tucked within walking distance of these residential buildings. 
  
I also discovered a cache of photographs of Bunker Hill taken by George Mann during the 1950s. His daughter found them in the basement as she prepared for a move. She held exhibits of his work and now they are posted on the Internet. What a treasure trove of street scenes and structures just as they looked when my character lived among them.
  
With these images lodged in my mind, I’m having better luck imagining Opal walking those streets and settling into the city. L.A. is a world away from the dusty streets of Mineral City, but Opal feels at home here in the company of a diverse and creative community of musicians, poets, actors, and artists. She thinks she might find her voice here and make a name for herself out from under the thumb of her mother.
  
Just a thought: Sometimes writing feels like swimming through a murky pond.
 
Solution: “Just keep swimming!”

Write On!
Cheryl