#ScribesAndMakers Feb. 5 – You now have the same occupation as the main character of your current WIP (or book you are reading/last read) What job are you doing?
I'm... I'm a horse 🐴 Not a domesticated or working one, for better or for worse, but a wild/feral mare with a filly. Could have been worse I guess.
I'm not writing a children's story about horses btw, at least it's not intended to be and I'll be writing with the same complexity of language and concepts as I do for grownups--maybe even more so. It's not an equestrian story either, no rider-rescues-and-teaches-frightened-horse-for-its-own-good (blech), no tame-the-wild-horse-into-docility fantasy (yeesh), in fact no horse-riding period. These wild horses will STAY wild, thank you. Horses will enlist humans' aid at their own need and discretion, not in an "I'm helpless in the face of your species' awesome powers, help me, great human 🥺 " way but in a "Your kind are making trouble for us again, you will provide assistance while we take out your trash" way. But the horse doesn't do human-talk, because fuck watering down everything to human levels. (No issue with anyone else writing about talking animals, obviously, I just don't want it for my story because these characters are based on real-life animals with a painful history and I want to keep them wild in every day.)
Well, that's the plan anyway. We'll see how it turns out, since the initial research is just settling in and the bones of the story are starting to form. Looking forward to what comes of it.
It's somewhat bittersweet that as an endangered species my wild horse character's "job" from a human standpoint is to survive and breed. On the one hand we should all be celebrated just for existing (breeding strictly optional, of course), on the other it's an unspeakable loss that her species and so many others died out in the wild, too often because humans killed them and destroyed their habitats. Her species happens to be one of the "lucky" ones that humans cared enough about and had enough stock to breed back, and even so the species is unlikely to recover to its former state. But her people's story is also one of resilience and resourcefulness against the odds, and I choose to celebrate that in the form I know best.
