Holy Cow. Or Holy Horse.

I got bit in the head by a horse.

My daughter and I were at the stable getting the horse ready for her weekly lesson, and he took a chomp at my hair.

I should have expected it. I mean, he was being a pill that day as my daughter prepped him for her lesson. He pushed. He nipped a few times. He lifted his head as high as he could knowing there was no way I could get the halter on him.

I was reading the signs. Watching to make sure his hoof didn't end up on my foot. Or in my gut. Or that he wouldn't take the pocket off my coat.

But I wasn't expecting the chomp-o-rama of his teeth against my scalp.

Especially on the top of my head.

After I toweled off the horse spit and poked the bruise 20 times to prove to myself that he really did bite me, I was still thinking to myself, "Holy cow. I can't believe he bit me."

And that, my friends writerly and otherwise, is good plot. The signs are there. The audience is invested and interested, and then: WHAM-O. They get something they weren't expecting.

Spit on the head. Teeth in the scalp. All of it.

Great plot happens when a writer makes the audience look back and say, "I thought I was reading all the signs. I can't believe I didn't figure it out sooner."

So onward. Charge ahead on that steed before he decides your head looks like a bag of oats...and work on writing great plot.

It's all my Mother's fault

I recently realized I can blame all of my struggles and frustrations about finding an agent on my Mother.

If it weren't for her influence, I could write some very commercial, very fluffy teenage alien fallen angel vampire romance that agents would snap up and publishers would fight over at auction because it would make everybody millions. But I can't.

While growing up there were plenty of romance novels floating around to temper our teenage hormones, but they were bedtime reading. Something to fall asleep with that didn't require thinking. The reading equivalent of TV's The Bachelor.

Don't get me wrong. I fell asleep to many a romance novel plucked from the free box at the front of the library. But they had nothing on C.S. Lewis, E.L. Konigsburg, A.A. Milne, Dr. Seuss or Madeleine L'Engle. Those were the books Mom bought and kept on the shelves. Those were the ones that had me at hello.

Those and the small puberty books, with simple diagrams, which also found their way onto our bookshelves and substituted for my Mother's sex talk.

So I can't write fluff (or be Fluffy). I write stories that matter to me. So that I think, and laugh, and sometimes even cry.

And it's all my Mother's fault.