Mrs. Quarterhorse’s Beating Heart
The beating heart of Mrs. Quarterhorse resides nearly exactly in the middle of the story, and consists of a simple, unremarkable description of an everyday action: “She then picked a ladybug out of her hair, carried it to the back door, and released it onto a nearby branch.”
And with the story’s beating heart in your hands, please allow me to explain why that story is only now being published, more than five years after the author typed: “The End.”
Disclaimer: the following text includes self-indulgent prose so purple readers might suffer a lingering yellow afterimage.
Mrs. Quarterhorse began in 2019 under the provisional title Betsy Sets Out to Sea. The first draft, let’s call it, is a mountain of fever-scribbled text so high and broad the author has not, to this day, worked up the courage to read it! It served its purpose, though, by shaking the story by its ankles until only the essentials remained.
(The Betsy of the title, by the way, is the name of a boat. It was so named only because Betsy Sets Out to Sea rolls nicely off the tongue. The boat would be rechristened Super-Bell in Mrs. Quarterhorse, and reduced—in the first story, at least—to a single anecdotal mention.)
The second draft began, concurrently and fortuitously, with the advent of Covid. That pandemic clarified much in the story that the author hadn’t realised needed clarifying. Beplagued Thebes, sins of the father, so on and so forth. The second draft of Betsy Sets Out to Sea, now renamed, simply, after its central character, was begun in earnest in January of 2020, started afresh on a clean white page in a world gone all to rot!
By year’s end, Mrs. Quarterhorse and its follow-up, Mrs. Quarterhorse at the Masked Ball, had each endured a dozen drafts yet were nowhere near ready to be published.
The author here confesses to being no less superstitious than the card-reading protagonist of the Quarterhorse stories. This superstitious author had, for reasons personal and too insensible to explain, got it into his fool head during that second year of fevered writing, that the product of his labour would have to be uploaded somewhere before Christmas. Both books required many more drafts, extensive revisions, nearly total rewrites, but they were published to Amazon nonetheless. Uploaded but left invisible. No one knew they were there, no one would read them in their unfinished state. Superstition satisfied by the letter of the law.
The author chose to delay the rewrites, certain a little distance and fresh eyes would prove valuable. Furthermore, the author, now fully immersed in the series, was eager to get the third book underway. The opposite of writer’s block—too much needing to be set to paper.
The Many Charms of Mrs. Quarterhorse was completed by summer of 2021 to the author’s near-total satisfaction. He should have then returned to the first book, to coax blood from its dismal heart, but the momentum was too great, he had to get the fourth book underway. Additionally, while each book in the Quarterhorse series is intended as a standalone story, able to be appreciated on its own, The Many Charms of Mrs. Quarterhorse, while not ending on a cliffhanger, does still leave its characters in a pinch. The author was as eager to write his characters out of that pinch every bit as much as he hopes readers will one day be eager to read them out! The third book was uploaded to Amazon to accompany the first two, all to remain invisible for a while longer.
It truly never occurred to the blockhead that uploading unfinished books was a bad idea.
The fourth book, Mrs. Quarterhorse Adrift, was completed by the end of 2021. It turned out as beautifully as the third book; and so, further encouraged, the author signalled with a backward gesture for the first two books to wait just a little longer while he drove on, this time into the luridly titled fifth story, The Ecstasy of Mrs. Quarterhorse. In fairness to the author, this fifth book was an irresistible draw, the story he’d been working toward since that very first draft, while the series was still titled after a boat called Betsy!
After a year working exclusively on this huge fifth book, the author, needing to get away from it for a few months before working it to completion, finally returned to the first two stories.
Two full years have since passed!
Two years of reworking, rewriting, and refining those first two books, Mrs. Quarterhorse and Mrs. Quarterhorse at the Masked Ball. Two years of precordial thumping, getting that languorous heart pumping blood to its extremities, so that the series might begin as the beautifully flush-cheeked living thing it was meant to be. And, finally, in January 2026, those first two books have finally been properly published! Mrs. Quarterhorse returns to her kitchen while the ladybug continues its very important business of poking among the leaves and just generally being a pleasantly polka-dotted garden accoutrement.
As for the third, fourth, and fifth books, the plan at present is for them to follow one every few months, so that each may be given a thorough final working-over and polish.
It’s worth mentioning that new cover illustrations have been drawn for the rewritten first two books, and new cover designs for all five. The author had grown to loathe the original covers. The text was at odds with the illustrations, and the designs did not properly witness their stories. The new covers, however, are perfect. No bait and switch—if you like the covers, you’ll like the books; and I am certain a reader with a disposition willing to endure this dissertation to its end is of that rare species!
The next time you pick a ladybug from your hair, while searching for a suitable branch on which to deposit the little creature, pause to notice the thump-thump-thump within your own chest and remember the beating heart of Mrs. Quarterhorse!
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