I’m now well enough to do some serious work on the book–and I thought you’d be amused by one kind of cut\/alteration that’s going on now.<\/p>\n
This one is about horses.\u00a0\u00a0 I’m a horse-enthusiast as many of you know, and I inherited my friend K-‘s\u00a0 horse, trained to Grand Prix level in dressage and shown at Prix St. George about a year before she died.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I myself had never ridden at that level. \u00a0 But K- was giving me some lessons on him, in the hope that he would connect better with me (not really–or not for the first five years at least.) \u00a0 In the process, I learned to ride some advanced movements that were a lot of fun, and obviously would be of use to someone riding a horse in battle.<\/p>\n
One of the things this particular horse found easy was half pass in canter or counter-canter (either one.) \u00a0 It was exhilarating to find oneself moving on a\u00a0 diagonal line\u00a0 while the horse’s body remained (with a very slight curve) on a parallel to the side of the school.\u00a0\u00a0 He could also do flying changes in half-pass at canter, which was even more fun,\u00a0 so you could zig-zag back and forth across the school, while always facing “straight forward” (almost.)<\/p>\n
So: picture the writer “seeing” Kieri on Banner, his gray charger,\u00a0 approaching two enemies…”that” far from one another.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 How would this engagement play out?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 From inside my POV character (Kieri in this instance) , I clearly felt the slight shift of seatbones and leg that produce “counter-canter half-pass to the left” and then, when Kieri had delivered a stroke to enemy A, the shift that produced a flying change and change to the other diagonal to attack enemy B.\u00a0 (Yes, I wiggle a lot in the chair.)<\/p>\n
The original text had this in detail…from hand gallop to collected canter to half-pass in counter-canter to the left, then change of direction and leg through flying change to half-pass in counter-canter to the right.<\/p>\n
Of interest to dressage students, who might critique whether the choice of counter-canter (which has some advantages)\u00a0 was better than canter for the maneuvers and the use of that size and weight of sword, but otherwise totally opaque to readers who–riders or not–were not dressage enthusiasts.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Thus, slowing down the action.<\/p>\n
The current text (still not the final text, necessarily) merely says the horse shortened into collection (which most people sortakinda understand) and obeyed Kieri’s leg, bringing him close to Enemy A.<\/p>\n
A few readers would prefer the earlier text, I’m sure–those with special knowledge.\u00a0 But others…I think not.\u00a0\u00a0 There’s a battle going on.\u00a0 What matters is who gets killed, who survives, what that means.\u00a0\u00a0 Not the details of what a half-pass in counter-canter is, or how to ride one.<\/p>\n
Still–for those riders among you who haven’t ever gotten to do this–if you have a chance to ride a dressage horse trained for it, and can learn the signals, it is an absolute delight to realize how precisely you can place a horse relative to anything.\u00a0 And if you ever get to ride such a horse with sword in hand (which I did a few times with K-‘s horse) many things about mounted warfare become very clear very fast, including the need for that accuracy of placement.\u00a0\u00a0 If you’re four inches too far from the post from which you want to remove a melon…your enemy got away.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 If you’re too close, your knee is forfeit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’m now well enough to do some serious work on the book–and I thought you’d be amused by one kind of cut\/alteration that’s going on now. This one is about horses.\u00a0\u00a0 I’m a horse-enthusiast as many of you know, and I inherited my friend K-‘s\u00a0 horse, trained to Grand Prix level in dressage and shown […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45,5],"tags":[62,12,51,107],"class_list":["post-930","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-revisions","category-the-writing-life","tag-craft-of-writing","tag-research","tag-revision","tag-the-writing-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/930"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=930"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/930\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":932,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/930\/revisions\/932"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=930"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=930"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=930"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}