OK — all of you who don’t get the whole horse thing, look away now.
The rest of you may be familiar with my opinions on writing and riding and the parallels to be found therein. I’ve blathered on before about ‘throughness’ – a dressage term that describes the perfect communication of intent between rider and horse — and the fact that it’s equally applicable to the perfect connection between writer and reader. I’m much better at achieving throughness as a writer than a rider; so much so, that I can usually tell which passages will be quoted in my reviews, because they’re the ones that come out of an almost trance-like state of throughness, straight from the subconscious. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, it’s as if a direct channel of communication has been established between some deep place in my psyche and the reader. The writing that results often surprises even me.
But I’m disgruntled with both writing and riding at the moment. I blame it on February, or maybe all the rain. (Though I do quite like the fact that There Is No Dog has forty days and forty nights of rain in its otherwise modern narrative. So perhaps I’m to blame for all this miserable weather? Or am I indulging in one of those pesky psychotic delusions again?) 
The problem is that the book refuses to get finished. I’m fed up with my 19-year-old God, and every time I think the end of the book is nigh, it turns out to be just another false summit. My agent says this is what happens when you take on life, the universe, and God as a topic. I think she’d like to use the word hubris.
As for riding, I was feeling so strong and secure and competent sometime around Christmas, and after six weeks of ice, lousy weather, a horse with a sore back, and hardly any riding at all, I’m all floppy and hopeless. For our last few lessons, Moss and I have been looking significantly more Laurel and Hardy than Torville and Dean. Not his fault. He’s the beauty, I’m the beast. My lack of throughness lets him down.
Lovely Moss
I always feel guilty complaining about any element of my life — being a writer is so much lovelier and more pleasant than virtually any other job — (with the possible exception of dreaming up movie titles). I get time off to sleep and think and walk dogs and ride horses, and can call all of it part of my working day. But some days (and weeks), when throughness continually evades my grasp, I feel clumsy, nervous, exhausted from the effort, and disappointed with the result.
With a strong heart and enough hard graft, I’m sure it’ll all come out OK.
Eventually.
If I don’t break my neck first.
About once every three weeks, they’d send a bike to my office in the Chrysler building on 42nd street (my day job was in advertising) with a film script or the rough cut of a new film, and I’d have the evening to think up forty alternative titles. It was a doddle, and besides, I loved doing it. These were the days before home computers, so I depended greatly on reference books — Bartlett’s Quotations and Brewers Dictionary of Phrase and Fable being my favourites. It was all about making associations, looking up lines of poetry, thinking laterally. Not unlike the horrible job of coming up with book titles, only not so fraught, as someone else was making the final choice.
For this service, you see, they paid me $1,000. 
Twenty years later, I would still consider that brilliant pay for an evening’s work — it was an absolute fortune back then. Unfortuantely, they never used my film titles, a fact which worried me so much that I phoned the boss one day and said that honour required me to resign — they couldn’t keep hiring me when I was obviously no good at the work. Mr Tristar sounded truly astonished. ”But we barely use any of the work we pay for!” Oh. So concluded my first lesson in the film business, 1980s-style.
The new paperback cover is, if possible, even more beautiful (though sadly lacking the horse). Will it prove….too artsy? Too subtle? Too female?
writer of literary fiction, in fact (her most recent book, out soon, is called Lost).
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