My i key keeps sticking, which results in interesting typos in almost every post…

But on to horses. As someone who is very new to this whole horsecare thing, I never realized before that a stall is a lot like a really big litterbox. When it rains, the horse stands in that litterbox all the time, unless you want to ruin your pasture. This means that the litter box must be cleaned. Frequently.

One of the steps to this stall cleaning involves the laying down of that stall version of kitty litter, sawdust. As you can imagine, it takes a lot of sawdust to fill a stall, or, in my case, three stalls, and the sawdust has to be added to frequently. Here in our watchtower on the Thorncrest peninsula on the hilly ground sloping down to the Sea of Terror, we have five stalls, one of which is given over to holding sawdust. We were running low, so I paid a fellow to dump some more from a small dump truck. It took yours truly some three and a half hours to shovel it into the stall. I’m in decent shape, but the muscles one uses for shovelling aren’t ones I normally use and I’m a bit sore today as a result.

I was talking with John about the irony of these horses at Black Gate’s southern outpost. Here, now, I finally have hands-on, eyewitness experience working with horses every single day, and there isn’t a single horse in the novel series I’m working on, nor will there be, since the whole thing is a sword-and-planet seafaring thing. I used to write pieces with horses all the time. When I next do that, I’ll be able to write of them far more convincingly. Maybe I’ll have Dabir and Asim solve the mystery of a murdered horse. Hah.

Howard