smellshorsey

Please Help a Writer be Accurate About Travel by Horses

You know how offended us horse people get when we read books where the information or use of horses isn't accurate and it just ruins the whole story? Well, now's our chance to help a writer get it right.

A friend sent me an e-mail requesting information about how people traveled by horseback in pre-industrial revolution America. To me, traveling with horses requires a truck, so I don't know the answers. Can y'all help by answering the following very good questions?

My characters are going to travel on horseback and with a mule across South Carolina from the coast to the mountains. The first two days they want to travel fairly quickly, (I'm thinking about 4 miles an hour) just in case they are being followed. They will travel about eight hours a day.

 

Questions:

1. How often should they stop to rest the horses?

2. How many times a day would the horses eat?

3. What could the horses eat along the way? I'm thinking that since they stick close to the river, there should be access to grasses. Should I have them pack some feed on the mule (corn, oats)?

Carnival of Christian Writers Today -- Good Stuff to Read!

Today is the Carnival of Christian Writers, and I'm honored to be included. Click here for some inspiring and helpful words from working Christian writers.

How my horses got into fiction

I keep wanting to blog about a really funny incident that happened with a Shetland pony my father bought for my nephew. The pony got his nose stuck in a box....and then....

But I've already written this episode and countless others, into my fiction. The overall story is fiction -- I made it up -- but some of the components are my real horses.

So, for today's post, I'm going to link to the story that has the pony-with-the-nose-in-the-box episode in it. The story is strange in a number of ways. First, it was supposed to be a story about a controlling grandmother who bought her granddaughter a pony so the family couldn't move away without great heartache to the granddaughter. (This I made up.) But the grandmother never made it into the story. The original concept did have a saddle in it. A western pony saddle.

And there's another unusual twist to the story. It is about a mother, daughter and father living in the country with horses. Sounds like my real life now. Except, when I wrote the story, I wasn't even pregnant.And we lived in the suburbs and I boarded my TB dressage/eventing horse elsewhere. My real horse was very much afraid of pigs and that part is real. And one thing that has always bothered me about the story, which I always intended to fix, is that the dressage exercises go in the wrong order. I tell you that so you know that I know better. I would tell more, but it would spoil the story.

If you've got a few minutes and like literary fiction, visit "Riding Past the Pigs" here or here. (Click on "Riding Past the Pigs".

Let me know what you think! I'm feeling very exposed here.