Stranger than Fiction

Disclaimer: Some of you may have already read this on my Guest Blog entry at Karin Tabke’s site (www.karintabke.com, check her out!). Not that it isn’t worth reading twice – I’m just sayin’.

Lately I’ve become fascinated with the whole concept of writing queries. For the uninitiated, a “query” is what an unpublished writer sends to agents to try to sell a manuscript they have already written. In a nutshell, it’s their story condensed into a few succinct paragraphs. The query hits on key plot points, characters and conflicts and gives enough info to entice the reader to want know more, but doesn’t give away the surprises or ending – think of it as a movie trailer in written format.

I have had individual works published, but the Road to Publication for the humorous essay is quite different than for a full-blown novel. There’s a real talent to capturing the essence of a story in a quarter-page query. I wondered if it was something I could even do. But I didn’t want to have to write a whole novel to find out. That could take…..hours.

But life itself is a story, isn’t it? And often it’s stranger than fiction. So instead of inventing a story, I took a day in my life and captured it in query format. Here it is, for your reading entertainment:

Introverted, menopausal redhead Jody Werner has finally arranged her life exactly the way she likes it: simple and drama-free. She works at home doing the artwork she loves, has a cute little studio in a blissfully quiet neighborhood and gets to spend the glorious California summer afternoons at the barn with the horses. The cherry on top of the sundae that is her life: she has the freedom to nap anytime she wants. Ah, life is good.

She’s looking forward to another blessedly uneventful day in her “I-refuse-to-turn-on-the-tv-and-hear-any-bad-news” paradise….until the phone call from the mysterious entity known only as The Banker.

The Banker tells her that before her loan application can be accepted, she has to come up with two years back tax returns. Oh no! That means a journey into the black hole that is her filing system; the swirling, bottomless abyss into which paperwork disappears, never to resurface. 

Aided by The Ladder (which creaks and wobbles the higher she climbs) and The Flashlight (which takes sick pleasure in randomly blinking in and out of usefulness) she embarks upon the treacherous journey into The Attic in search of The Box.

But finding The Box is not enough. Working against time, she must assemble two years of back tax returns in the proper order AND find a logical explanation for the decided dip in income for 2007. There is only one way to summon this kind of creativity on short notice: she must sacrifice herself at the altar of chocolate and caffeine.

With a solution (and chocolate-smeared tax returns) in hand she hurries out the door only to discover that her car has a flat tire! While waiting for the roadside assistance people, she gets a call from the barn. Her horse has lost a shoe! Now she has to get the flat fixed, deliver the tax returns to The Banker, locate her farrier and still find a way to get in her afternoon nap. Will she make it, or will the universe add insult to injury by extracting the ultimate price of unplanned expenditures AND sleep deprivation?

I am seeking validation for the non-fictional masterpiece that is my life. Jody’s Day is a complete waste of your time at 75,000 words. I’d be happy to submit the full manuscript for your consideration, provided you give me ample time to find it in The Box.

Is your life stranger than fiction? If so, express your sentiment with Stranger Than Fiction merchandise, available here, at the Misfit Designs online store: http://www.cafepress.com/jlwdesigns/6823909

   

Vaulting: It's Not Just for Kids

Writer’s note: This is a slight revision of a piece that was published in Vaulting World Magazine in June of 2006, reprinted here by popular demand.

Not long ago, I watched an exhibition of vaulting. I don’t know what ‘vaulting’ means in your world, but in mine it refers to gymnastics on horseback. It’s lithe-bodied little (and not so little) girls and even some boys performing all manners of moves, poses, athletic feats and gravity-defying stunts on a moving horse.

I’ve ridden horses since I was ten years old, and the First Commandment has always been to stay on it. In the saddle. Facing forward. Even slight variations of this standard were met with disdain.

Riding backwards and standing up on the horse’s back and doing headstands?  Our instructors always discouraged that sort of thing. Just like they’d get all pasty-faced and panicky if we tried to teach our ponies to rear so we could do our Lone Ranger “Hi-Ho Silver” routine. Any deviation from The Norm would have them running for Valium and liability release forms.

As for getting on a horse while it’s moving - my cronies and I do well to haul our sorry backsides onto a stationary horse with the help of a mounting block or a friend to give us an ungraceful “leg up.”

These little vaulting sprites stride up beside the horse (which moves in perfect cadence in a perfect circle) and hop right on it – at all gaits. Walk. Trot. Canter. No problem. Somehow they never end up hanging under the horse’s belly with their heads plowing up the earth as I imagine I would. 

The littlest people who get to perform the most death-defying acts are known as the “flyers.” In my discipline, a “flyer”is what you do when your horse skids to an unscheduled stop and you keep going. While equally dramatic, our flyers are more verb than noun and less about form than distance. 

Vaulters also have an impressive repertoire of ways to get off the moving horse. They may slide off, or flip over the side, or do a roll or even a back flip off the horse’s back or butt. On purpose.

In my style of riding, we have two kinds of dismounts – Get Off, and Fall Off. If you want to split hairs, Fall Off can be subdivided into Bail Before It Gets Worse and the more common Never Saw It Coming. If you ever see us exiting our horse when it is doing anything other than standing like a statue, it’s because something has gone horribly wrong.

I can also imagine my horse’s reaction if I ever tried to run up and throw my leg over his back when he was trotting along. Assuming he’d let me get close enough to spit on him, I’m sure he’d take my ungraceful floundering as permission to flee into the next county. Even if he were on a longe line, his most likely response would be to drag me through the peony bush. As for what he would do if I tried to stand up or do a headstand on his back...I might as well just hurl my body face-first into the ground and save him the trouble.

But I have to admit, I’ve actually tried it. Vaulting, I mean, not hurling my body face-first into the ground. I took vaulting lessons one winter, and I loved it. It was completely different from anything I’ve ever done on horseback. It was exhilarating. And there’s something about the oddness of looking up at the sky from your vantage point lying across a moving horse’s back that just appeals to my inner sense of weirdness. However, I draw the line at wearing the slinky little full-body leotards that the little girls do. I’m not leaving the house looking like a florescent super hero unless it’s Halloween and I’ve knocked back more than a few shots. I think at my age leggings and a baggy tee shirt are more appropriate.

I’m going to try vaulting again this summer, and I am preparing for it even now. I remember what parts of my body took a beating last time I tried it, so I am attempting to condition said parts to better withstand the demands of the sport. I’m doing pushups for my upper body. I’m jumping on and off of my little trampoline to strengthen and stabilize my ankles. Perhaps I’ll even practice a few moves on those big propane tanks out in back of the barn. I may give new meaning to the term “flyer” if any of that propane goes up.

I will approach it with a youthful exuberance and a can-do attitude. And perhaps a couple of pillows tied around my body, because the ground is a lot harder than it was when I was a kid. Assuming the emergency room has internet access, I’ll let you know how it goes.

Jody Werner is a writer, artist and semi-professional horseman who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. A successful hunter/equitation rider and competitor, she also enjoys an occasional foray into the world of vaulting. She has a Thoroughbred gelding who would never let her stand up on his back, and who quite frankly would prefer it if she’d stay off of him entirely.

A Tale of Two Bales

We’ve got “hay reserves” in back of the barn that consist of a couple-three bales of hay tipped up on their ends and leaned neatly against the side of the building.

Last week I was walking my horse behind the barn. He decided to grab a mouthful of alfalfa off the bale. You could hardly expect him to pass it by, any more than you could expect a cop car not to stop for a guy on the corner holding out a fresh cup of Starbucks.

Unfortunately, my horse decided to grab his mouthful from the BOTTOM of the bale. This is like doing the old yanking the tablecloth out from under the dishes trick and not yanking fast enough. The alfalfa bale toppled.

It fell sideways into the bale of oat hay. Alfalfa is heavy. Oat hay is light. It was like the Budweiser Clydesdales falling into the Taco Bell Chihuahua. The oat bale crashed to the ground and the flakes splattered like a bag of ice cubes heaved off the back of a speeding truck onto the highway. Hay slid everywhere.

Picking up the alfalfa flakes was easy. Alfalfa flakes are pressed together harder than particleboard. You’d have better luck disemboweling yourself than getting alfalfa off the flake. Really, you could fire alfalfa flakes out of a cannon, take out a small town, and the flakes would still be perfectly formed when they landed on the other side. They’re nature’s perfect bricks. If the ancient Egyptians had used alfalfa brick instead of bedrock, the Sphinx would still have its nose.

It was easy to put them back into a neat stack – kinda fun, even. It brought back memories of playing with Lego and Lincoln Logs. I suppose I could have built a duck blind or my own version of Burning Man or something useful, but the daylight and my jocularity were fading rapidly.      

Oat hay does not stack well once it has come un-flaked. It has no cohesive properties. Trying to stack oat hay is like trying to stack a pile of those colored plastic drinking straws. Try it some time. Take a big handful of soda straws and try to press them all together into a pile and make them stay put. That’s pretty much what it was like trying to pile the oat hay back up. I’d scoop up an armful, get half of it into the stack and half of it would slide back to the ground. What’s the name of that guy in the Greek myth? You know, the one who was condemned to forever push a boulder up a hill, only to have the rock slip and roll back down every time he neared the summit? It was like that.

After a lot of re-scooping and re-piling interspersed with creating new ways to combine cuss words, I had the oat hay arranged into something that looked almost exactly but not quite entirely unlike a stack. Although it yinged this way and yanged that way, it was arguably upright. But as I bent down to scoop the last bit of hay from the ground, the stack reached some sort of critical mass and collapsed in all directions. Oat hay slid willy nilly, the way skaters would scatter if you tossed a few well-timed bowling balls out at the Ice Capades. It was carnage. The Hindenburg would have been easier to clean up. 

I never did get the hay back into a neat pile. Out of daylight and patience, there was nothing left to do but pull a tarp over the mess and flee the scene of the crime. Tomorrow, people would discover the destruction. They’d blame our Mexican groom Antonio. He’d never be able to summon up enough English to defend himself. I’d be safe. I’d just have to wear long sleeves for a week to hide all the scratches I’d gotten wrestling with the prickly hay.

And next time I took my horse walking behind the barn, I’d be sure to keep the hay bales out of his reach.