Mrs. Quarterhorse’s Beating Heart
Somewhere within every worthwhile story is a beating heart. Only its effects are visible—the story’s rising and falling chest, its breaths both heavy and languid, its fluttering lashes, its snorting nostrils, and every other twitch from its fingers to its toes. The beating heart is never a speech. Never quotable. No witty affectation can keep a story alive. The beating heart is never a message, nor a theme, nor an encapsulation. Such things are props pumping nothing.
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! No matter, it served its purpose. It shook 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. Sneering prophesy! All these things had been in the story from the start, but deep within the flesh. Covid drew them out, just as that grim poultice drew out so many other hidden miseries during those dreary days. 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, and arrived near enough the Aristotelian standard to be considered ready for publication.
The author here confesses to being no less superstitious than the card-reading protagonist of the Quarterhorse stories. A personal failing, one of many. 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 published before Christmas. And so, it was. Both books required many more drafts, extensive revisions, nearly total rewrites, but they were published nonetheless. The author had no choice, cowering as he was beneath the lash of a phantom whip!
The books were technically published on Amazon, but not actually published. Uploaded but left invisible. No one knew they were there, no one would find them, 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 would prove valuable. Fresh eyes and so on. 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. No time for even a glance backward!
The Many Charms of Mrs. Quarterhorse was completed by summer of 2021 to the author’s complete satisfaction. And to celebrate this pivotal moment in the writing of the Quarterhorse series, please allow the author to wrest himself from the third person to address the reader less formally.
I should have then returned to the first book, to coax blood from its dismal heart, but the momentum was too great. I had to push forward. 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 with a cliffhanger, does still leave its characters in a pinch. I was as eager to write my characters out of that pinch every bit as much as I hope 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 until the fourth was finished.
It is worth mentioning that the author, that is to say, me, slipping briefly back into the third-person so I can critique myself with the appearance of objectivity, has absolutely no marketing sense. It truly never occurred to the dunderhead that uploading books but keeping them secret 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.
In fairness to the author, this fifth book was an irresistible draw, the big one, the story he’d been working toward since that very first draft, while the series was still titled after a boat called Betsy.
And a year later that Everest lay entirely underfoot an author exhausted from the climb, dizzy from the lighter air, and just plain spent.
Let’s change metaphors. The Ecstasy of Mrs. Quarterhorse had been extraordinarily difficult to write. It kept getting away, like a wild horse! The author fought with the spitting beast, a proper nightmare, a Fuselian terror, day after night and night after day, only very gradually saddling the animal and reining it in. And now the Earth shakes beneath the thundering stamps of this half-tamed beauty called Magnum Opus! I suppose I should remain in the third-person to dispense such praise, but nerts to humility. The Ecstasy of Mrs. Quarterhorse is an excellent book worthy of the two excellent books preceding it. Worthy is the word, worthy! Three stories worthy of a reader’s attention. Clean arpeggios of text that tell well-formed, intelligent stories of infinite re-readability. I’m proud of these books, proud of them in all possible senses and tenses!
I’m proud of them, yes, but I am at the same time not unaware that my feelings are unlikely to be shared by many, if any, and I am further aware that once readers begin telling me how little they like the stories I’ll slump over and drop from my saddle.
But until then, the nightmare and I will strut in the shadow of my grand delusion.
With such confidence, the author—politely retreating to the third-person after his shameful moments of arrogance and self-doubt—eagerly returned to the first two stories.
Two full years have passed since then, two years of reworking Mrs. Quarterhorse and Mrs. Quarterhorse at the Masked Ball. Not reworked in a bad way, in the way revisions can often beat the life out of a story, no, the very opposite, more a precordial thumping, getting that languorous heart pumping blood to its extremities, so that the two books might begin the series as the beautifully flush-cheeked living things they were meant to be.
Yes, the heart now beats! 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.
The first two books are finally ready to be published—properly this time! 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 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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