My side of the story

Snoopy has written in his diary today about how he got a stomach ache yesterday and just had to lay down. (See "Tummy trouble") What he glossed over was the fact that I was on him, in the saddle, when he decided to do this.

I've seen horses go down with other riders. As a matter of fact, I was riding Copper, my trainer's old show horse, when I watched my friend Christine get her leg caught under her horse Murphy when he decided he wanted to lay down and roll. (He was a young horse.)

I had watched Niki riding Snoopy before I got on him. He seemed to be quiet and responsive to her commands. He had started the day quite perky. Ate his breakfast. Pooped a bunch of times. Poop is important with horses. It means everything is cycling correctly.

But he did a funny thing while we were adjusting the stirrups for my turn to ride: he began to paw at the ground. It's not that he never paws. It's that, given the opportunity to try to bite me or Niki, he would never spend time digging in the dirt.

Once I was on him, it felt hard to get him to walk. Nevertheless, I pushed him forward by constantly fanning my legs on his sides. Niki told me to stop every once in awhile to move him around by one leg, so I stopped, preparing to pivot his back end around. That's when I heard Niki yell.

"Kick him! Kick! Him!"

Too late. I felt his front end sink down and watched his knees hit the dirt. It was all very slo-mo. I remember thinking, which way is he going to fall? His weight went right, so I kicked my leg out of the stirrup and dove right, away from him. I probably looked awkward as hell, but I felt like a super hero escaping a trap.

Next time, I'm wearing a cape.

We walked him and watched him and walked him again and worried. There's nothing like seeing your horse down, legs tucked under his belly, head lowered and mouth pinched - I confess, I wanted to weep a little. But after the second walk, he perked up. I mean, really perked up. As in, hanging his head out the door and asking for food.

We decided not to give him more than a handful of hay. He disagreed, but what can he do? Until he can unhook his door and help himself to dinner, I still have a smidgeon of control.

Today I've heard that he is up and about, eating and pooping.

Life is good and every day is a blessing.

Some days are like a box of chocolates. Others are like a carnival game.

In either case, you never know what you're going to get, but at least I like chocolates. Carny games can give you a cute stuffed animal or a cheap plastic spork.

So today, I was going to write and submit my column, then fill out the form to enter a contest, then call the woman at the Horse Expo Pomona to get extra ad space for my booth at the Book Corral. How did that work out for me?

Column written, edited, submitted - check. It's a good one, too, about a group in Placentia. Very topical.

Forms to enter a contest filled out - check. All I have to do is mail the books.

Horse Expo ads - check with a CAVEAT. Uh-oh.

To get the fullest bang for my buck, I needed to send seven (7) photos of my "product", a URL where people can find it, a 40-word description, and a YouTube video. Like I said, uh-oh. I don't have a book video of Snoopy's memoir.

Make that "I didn't have a book video." I spent the better part of the morning tossing something together. I won't say it's my most shining moment. I'm not Scorsese, for Pete's sake. It reminds me a little of a salad - a lot of things tossed together - but it moves in a fairly linear motion. I'm not cringing.



Now it's time to package my books and head off to the ranch, with a brief stop at the post office. Later, Peeps.

On your mark, get set...

GO over to Amazon at midnight tonight, and you can pick up a free copy of From the Horse's Mouth: One Lucky Memoir for your Kindle.

That's right. F.R.E.E.

Snoopy's book will be free until Sunday the 13th. Ya snooze, ya looze. (Yes, I know it's misspelled but it looks funnier this way, and I'm all about the funny.)

Amazon link:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00D0HDYRQ

One from Column A, one from Column B

Whenever I go out to a new restaurant with my son, Marcus, there is a point in the adventure where I say, "Make up your mind." This is usually said with a bit of force and a touch of impatience, since I've been watching him trying to decide what to eat for several several SEVERAL minutes.

Karma's a bitch, friends.

I am now staring at a goodly number of most excellent photos of my horse, Snoopy. I need one of these photos for the cover of his book. I also need one for our Bio page. I had used Lynne Glazer for my bio picture with Frostie in 2006. She has such an eye for every detail of her photos, from the original setup and composition, to light and color and post-processing. I knew I wanted her for this job. Now my problem is, she's so good, how do I choose?

So I have my book's title and jacket blurb in front of me as I carefully study each pose and ask, is this the one? I will probably choose two or three, just to give my cover designer a little wiggle room for his spectacular designs. But still...

I feel like my son, having to choose between the scampi and the crab. (Yes, his choices are always between the most expensive things on the menu.)

Here is the link to Lynne's photo shoot. http://www.photo.lynnesite.com/event/Snoopy-2013/MWMncPVKV7TxE
Here is the jacket blurb.

FROM THE HORSE’S MOUTH: ONE LUCKY MEMOIR

 

By Snoopy

As told to Gayle Carline

 

When I was a young horse, I thought if I wasn’t always good, I could at least be useful. Then I broke my leg.

Snoopy is an American Quarter horse. When he was three years old, he won the 2007 Pacific Coast Quarter Horse Association Trail Futurity. Both his trainer and his owner had his career mapped out. He excelled as a show horse. He would be campaigned around the circuit and qualify to be invited to the AQHA World Show.

Then in the spring of 2008, Snoopy broke his left hind sesamoid, a small bone in the leg that can mean anything from surgery to euthanasia. Two years later, he was finally being ridden. But would he be shown again?

In the tradition of Black Beauty, this is his story, told from his view in his voice. The story of a young horse who was a champion, then was injured. He tells the tale of his fight to return to the show arena, to prove he’s the same horse he always was, only different.

 

* * * * *

Now then, all I have to do is select wisely. No pressure.

The Next Big Thing (is somewhere else)

I'm a sucker for my friends, truly. When the delightful and engaging author Terry Ambrose offered me a seat on his Next Big Thing Blog Tour, my first thought was "Why of course I'll do that."

Then I thought about it. My next big thing is already here. The Hot Mess is out and about, available in ebook and paperback for your enjoyment. Not only that, but I already did a Next Big Thing blog about it back in November. You can read about it here.

So I declined.

Then, last week, Pam Ripling (aka Anne Carter) sent me an email. "Want to be tagged in my Next Big Thing Blog Tour?" Once again, I explained my predicament. I can always trust Pam to think outside the box.

"It's all optional," she said. "Just tweak the answers to do it on The Hot Mess."

So I was planning to do that, but when I read my last NBT post, I had already answered all the questions about The Hot Mess and I wouldn't change a thing, except to say that it was already released.

Snoopy dressed for Christmas.

Then I had an idea. I will point you to my horse's blog. I may not have a Next Big Thing, but he does. I'll let him answer the questions. So, go visit Snoopy's blog to learn about his Next Big Thing.

And do check out my friends' books.

Pinterest, shminterest.

Everybody and their dog have been singing the praises of Pinterest. I'm not a lemming, so I listened politely for awhile, until a bunch of my author friends began using it. Then I decided maybe I should check it out and see how it could be useful to me.


For about a week after I got my Pinterest account, I would log on, look at how to "pin" things and create "boards", then get exhausted thinking about it and log off. After awhile, I was getting a lot of followers and feeling badly, because what were they following? A user with no content? Really?


Over the past couple of days, guilt overwhelmed me and I started a couple of boards with a couple of pix. I've got "Peri's Haunts" with pictures of places I use in Freezer Burn and Hit or Missus (and the 3rd book, soon), and "My Horses" with pictures of Frostie and Snoopy.


Today, I know how this Pinterest thing can be useful. I posted a picture of Snoopy the night he was born with a quote from the memoir I'm writing. People I've never heard of are "re-pinning" the picture. (P.S. Re-pinning is when other people pin your picture to other places and kind of pass it around.) I could let these people know when Snoopy's memoir gets published and who knows?

Source: Uploaded by user via Gayle on Pinterest

What do you think? Oh, my Pinterest link is http://pinterest.com/gaylecarline, if you're p-interested.

How's the writing coming along?

People ask me that all the time. I don't know the answer. As a matter of fact, when I typed the words, they actually don't make any sense. How is the writing... progressing?

One word at a time.

When I first got serious about writing and wanted to write an entire novel, I didn't know what kind of story I wanted to tell. It was disturbing, let me tell you, to feel like I had this ability to put some pretty nifty words together and yet couldn't think of a damn thing to say. As a last resort, I took a short story I had been fiddling with for years, and made turned it into a novel. A really bad one. A really bad novel that taught me so many things:

1. Sometimes short stories are short for a reason.
2. It may have been bad, but I was capable of writing 90,000 words that had a beginning, a middle, and an end (more or less).
3. Clever writers might be able to bend the rules, but people learning to write a novel should listen to the experts.

When I got the idea for Freezer Burn, I made sure I was writing an active, perky-paced mystery. I fell in love with the characters and the plot and tried to make my readers love them, too. After I had finished (and edited, etc.) it, I got a publisher's interest so quickly that I didn't have to split my time between writing the next story and trying to push this one out of the nest.

This was a good thing, because I didn't have a next story. I knew I needed to write another Peri mystery, but I had no idea what kind of story to plop her into next.

Slowly, painfully, Hit or Missus took shape. It was a difficult child, but I finally wrestled it into a book I was finally proud to put my name on. In many ways, I love it as much, if not more, than Freezer Burn.

As soon as it was published, I knew the kind of story I wanted to tell. The third mystery, which is half-way written, deals with murder and arson. I'm burning Benny's house. He loses at least some of his Dino memorabilia, and of course, there's a stray body in the house when the fire is doused. I'm on the back nine, so to speak, of the mystery. It should be a breeze from here. Except...

I've been thinking of what to write after this book. I'll return to Peri, but first I want to write a mystery set in the AQHA horse show arena. The idea came to me one weekend when I was showing my horse, Snoopy. One still-yet-dark morning, I walked down the barn aisles at the L.A. Equestrian Center, passing by the mounds of used shavings that are dumped at the end of each aisle, to be picked up by a tractor once or twice a day. I suddenly imagined a pair of boots sticking out of the shavings, and a worker, thinking someone had thrown them away, trying to pick them up, only to find feet still in them.

And here we go, into a strange new world of trainers and riders and show promoters, all with their own motives and agendas.

So when I'm not writing the book I'm on, I'm thinking of my cast for the new book. Except...

While I was at the Southern California Writer's Conference, two interesting things happened. The first is, I sat in on a workshop given by Charmaine Hammond, author of On Toby's Terms, a book about their rambunctious Chesapeake Bay Retriever. She is a dynamite speaker, full of ideas on marketing and promotion, and I couldn't write fast enough.

The second thing that happened was that I met a lady I have been conversing with through Facebook, Debbie Emerson Echelberger Haas (tell me I'm not the only one who sings "John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt" when I read her name). She told me she's from San Marcos, which is where Snoopy went to meet Dr. Martinelli. Naturally, I had to prattle on a bit about why Snoopy had gone to see him, and Debbie said, "You should write a book about his experience, for kids who have accidents and injuries."

I don't think I'm ready to write a kid's book. I know they are the hardest, not the easiest, books to write, and I know how flooded the market is. However, the two interesting things collided in my brain to produce a desire to write Snoopy's memoir, from his perspective.

Fortunately for me, there was a workshop that day where you could pitch your book to an editor and a publisher and they would tell you whether you were being clear, telling too much/too little, or even had something marketable. I sat down and wrote and rewrote (and rewrote) furiously, then walked into the workshop and rewrote a little more. This is what I pitched:

"A young horse tells his story of becoming a champion, breaking his leg, then fighting to return to the show arena, to prove he's the same horse, only different."

The publisher, Jennifer Silva Redmond, said, "First of all, I'm your audience. I was a horse crazy girl and you've plugged in to that part of me that still wants to read a good horse story." She looked around the room and continued, "And I think there are probably more women in this room who were horse crazy girls and would read a good horse story."

Almost every woman in the room raised their hand.

So now I'm about 10,000 words into Snoopy's story. It's fun to get into his voice and see the world from his view. At the ranch, we tease that Snoopy is our four-legged Forrest Gump, so interpreting life for him is both a writer's challenge and dream.

From not knowing what to write about, I'm now juggling three completely different stories. Each day, a different one tugs at my sleeve, wanting my attention. How is my writing coming along?

One word at a time.

Help! (I need somebody)

Yesterday we did our traditional Christmas photo shoot. Years ago, we started taking a picture of the three of us to include in our cards. Then one year, I got the bright idea to include the dog and cat, too. This was a little more chaotic than just three people, especially since we were doing it in the living room with the camera on a tripod on a timer. Imagine:

Get everyone posed. Keep the dog from sniffing the cat. Keep the cat on son's lap. Get everyone re-posed. Go set the timer. Run back to family. Re-pose everyone. Hear click. Wonder whether you smiled or not. In the age of processed film, this made a difference.

When my mare, Frostie, had her baby (Snoopy), I decided we needed a Christmas picture with the horses, too. We tossed the cat and dog in the car and drove to the ranch, where we went through the same delightful process with the added difficulty of keeping Frostie from sniffing the cat and Snoopy from wandering in and out of the shot.

Now that we have a digital camera and can usually find a willing helper to take the pictures (thanks, Niki!) the only thing we have to do is pose. And re-pose. And re-pose again, until we have enough pictures to choose one. (I'll be posting the outtakes on Snoopy's blog, or you can see them on my Facebook page.)

My dilemma this year is that we actually got several pix that we could use, so I thought I'd see if anyone has a preference. Vote for your favorite in the comments below. If no one has a favorite, I may just toss a dart at them and see where it lands.

Picture 1:

Picture 2:

Picture 3:

Picture 4:

Picture 5:

Write, darn you!

One of the things that surprised me when I became a published writer is that everyone I meet is going to write a book. They're going to write it when:

* They retire.
* Their kids are older.
* Their life gets easier/less stressful/less busy.

Here's my response to those who are "going to write" - if you wait until your life is at the perfect place for you to write, you will never write. If you are going to be a writer, then write now. Your life will always be filled with one thing or another. We live our lives like goldfish, growing to the size of our container. If you can find 15 minutes a day where no one is pulling at your sleeve and you're conscious, you can write.

Now, you may not write your Great American Novel. Fifteen minutes a day is probably not enough. But you NEED to write SOMETHING. Look out your window and describe a bird in a tree or your kids playing in the yard. Think about a memory and jot it down. Take your 15 minutes to go back and edit the snippet you wrote yesterday. Start an outline or cast of characters for that novel you plan to write.

Writing involves the act of getting words and images out of your head and onto the paper. They need to be honed, so that the words you spilled out become the best words for what you're trying to say. If you don't practice this every day, you will never build your writing muscles. If you don't build those chops, then even if the perfect timing DOES exist and you end up on an island retreat with a laptop and all the time in the world, it won't matter because you won't know how to get stories out of your head and out where the world can appreciate them.

I write every day, although I don't always work on the book. Once a week, I write and deliver my column (What a Day) of about 600 words. Sometimes I'm asked to put together something for the choir, or for Tina's ranch. I also need to keep this blog up-to-date enough to keep people's interest. And then there's Snoopy.

Snoopy is one of my two horses (I also own his mother, Frostie), and I started a blog about him because two years ago, he broke a bone in his leg, and documenting his surgery and progress helped me deal with the enormous frustration I felt from being medically ignorant and having to pull information out of veterinarians. He's got a few followers, one of which is the last doctor I took him to - he's a lameness specialist and actually read all of the blog posts before talking to me. Can I just say I love that man?

Anyway, today I decided to update his blog, even though there's nothing spectacular going on in his life. I'll do some writing on the next book, sure, but I felt the need to flex my muscles in that direction.

Because I write every day.

Christmas faq: Whadja get?

How was everyone's Christmas? That is, everyone who celebrates Christmas. Not to offend, you know.

Mine was pretty good, except that I had the Cold of a Thousand Faces. For three days, it was a Sore Throat, one that hurt so badly I barely got any sleep. On Christmas Eve, it became a Stuffy Head, which meant I didn't feel like having my traditional glass of wine for dinner or glass of sherry while I stuffed stockings. On Christmas Day, I was treated to Runny Nose, inconvenient as hell when you're wandering around to different houses to exchange gifts. Boxing Day was for Sinus Headache - I felt like someone was boxing my brains out.

And now, I'm sniffly but better, all thanks to the good Drs. Motrin, Sudafed, Halls, Afrin, and Excedrin. Better living through chemistry, I always say.

As for gifts, I was apparently good this year. No gold stars, but there was no coal in my stocking - oh, wait, I stuffed that. I got a nice gift card to a day spa, some iTunes cards, a few t-shirts and scarves. It was all pleasant. But I received one present that made me laugh, cry, and count my blessings.

Let me explain.

A few years ago, Dale got me horseback riding lessons for my birthday. One set of four lessons. I took them, but wanted more, so I took more. I took more, but I wanted to ride more, so I leased my trainer's champion trail horse. That led to going to horse shows, which ultimately led to my buying Frostie, breeding her, raising Snoopy, etc. As you can tell, the whole thing went from a little costly to a lotta costly pretty quick. Dale didn't say Stop, but he is the most laconic man in the universe, given to waiting until the last minute before he says, "So, did you think that was a good idea?" or something like that.

So I didn't really know what he thought about it all. He rarely accompanied me to the horse shows, or went to the ranch.

And then, for Christmas, I got this:

It's my trainer's horse, Copper Kist, the belt buckle I won, and all my ribbons. He went to the ranch, got them all to help him take the photos, put it all together, and had it framed. In other words, he spent a lot of time and effort, recording a memory for me. He may not have said it, but he was proud of what I had done.

THIS Christmas, I got a large, flat package from Dale and Marcus. I opened it and found:

Dale acted fairly nonchalant, but Marcus was beaming. Father and son had collaborated on a collage of my debut novel, complete with reviews from Amazon (five stars!) and the front and back cover of my book.

Wait... the front and back cover?

I tried to be tactful. I told them how wonderful it was, how much I loved it. But sooner or later I had to ask, "Did you cut up one of my books?"

"We bought it first," Dale replied, as if that made it perfectly reasonable.

I really adore these guys, and I love what they've done, and I love that they're so proud of me, even if a small portion of my brain wants to scream, "You tore up a perfectly good book! You could have scanned the covers! Agh!"

Luckily, it's Christmas and I can just feed that portion of my brain some more fudge to placate it.

How about you? Whadja get?

The things I do for Christmas

My family and I did two important things today:

1. We took our annual Christmas picture.

2. We got our (live) Christmas tree.

The tree was pretty inconsequential. The picture - not so much.

In the olden days, we went to a "professional" photographer for the holiday pix. I'm using the quotes because the studio was one of those 1-hour places in the mall that have the appropriate backdrops but don't care if your baby is spitting up formula through the entire 10-minute session.

Then we got smart and started doing our own.

Of course, we had to have the whole family in the pictures, which used to mean the dog and cat. One year, we tried to include Ben, the gecko. Turns out Ben's very small, not very photogenic, and considered to be an appetizer by the dog and cat.

Those pictures were hectic enough, but now that we have two horses, the ante has been raised considerably. We take everyone out to the Silver Rose Ranch in Chino Hills (where the horses are boarded), find a green spot and take as many pictures as possible, in the hopes that one of them will look good enough for a Christmas card.

For the first time anywhere, I am going to show the outtakes of this year's session. This is what we deal with:

In this first shot, notice that Mikey the dog wants to get down because he does not like sitting on the bench's slatted seat (in theory, I agree, it's not comfy).

Katy, the cat, wants off the bench, off the ranch, and back at her nice house. The older she gets, the more she hates this day, and usually coughs up something disgusting on the carpet later, just to punish me.

Frostie is the chestnut horse to the left. At this point, she doesn't want to look at the bench because it wasn't there this morning and if she doesn't look at it, it will go away. Her son, Snoopy, however, wants to eat the bench because he's ADD and wants to put everything in his mouth...

Including our son, Marcus. His shirt and hat were endlessly fascinating, and I spent most of the time pulling his big face away from my teenager's neck. (Hey, I got it - the next book will be about horse vampires!)

Here's a little closeup:

Notice my right hand trying to get his attention while the taut lead rope tries to tug him away. Good sport that he is, Marcus smiles through the whole ordeal, while Katy is still determined not to pose for the papparazzi.

We finally got Snoopy's attention, when...

Frostie sees something in the bushes and gets Dale's attention, which makes Katy think she can make a break for it. At this point, only Snoopy and the dog are camera ready.

Twelve shots later, we finally had a picture no one would cringe at when we sent it out to friends and relatives. Here's the one we picked:

Okay, so Katy's still not smiling, and Frostie's ears aren't pointed forward, but five out of seven of us were facing the camera, so ya gotta take what ya can get.

It was also the millisecond before Snoopy made one final attempt at the teenager.

Now I just have to write the Christmas letter, and decorate the tree, and buy some presents, and...

REMINDER: BORDERS! CHINO! TOMORROW! NOON! BE THERE!

If I like to eat pickles, should I write about it?

I really meant to post this earlier, but something detained me –exhaustion. Yesterday, I spent the day taking care of animals, in one way or another.

Many people know I have horses. Two, to be exact: my 12-year old mare, Frostie and her 5-year old son, Snoopy. When people find out I wrote a book, their first question is often, "Does it have horses in it?"

No, as a matter of fact, there are no animals at all in Freezer Burn, at least not the four-legged kind. It was a conscious decision; I wanted to portray Peri as not being a natural nurturer. She's been married three times, is 50 years old, and has no children. I needed an explanation for that, and it seemed an easy progression to see her as someone who can't keep a goldfish alive.

She's a sympathetic gal, and has a good relationship with her BFF's kids, but has just never had the desire to have her own child and watch them grow. This is an important point in the book, because there's a subplot involving Peri thinking she might be pregnant. She has to confront her non-maternal instincts as she wonders what kind of upheaval a child would bring to her life.

Upheaval – with animals and kids, it sometimes comes down to that, doesn’t it? Unlike Peri, I'm the kind of gal who needs animals around. I like the feel of a cat settling into my lap to be rubbed, or the dog poking his nose into my hand to be stroked. When I am cleaning up their messes, or vacuuming the fur off the couch, I tell myself, "When this one goes, I'm not getting another one." But I lie. I can't live without a four-legged critter around.

As I was trying to get out of the house yesterday, our cat, Katie, came out of her litterbox dragging her tushie on the linoleum. It could only mean she had some, um, debris stuck in her fur, debris that I had to clean up before I could get out of the house. This cost me an extra 15 minutes. Upheaval.

I was trying to get out of the house in order to meet the horse transport company that would take Snoopy to a lameness specialist. Snoopy broke a bone in his leg last year and is still limping. His diagnosis and treatment has become such a big deal, he has his own blog to talk about it (http://thatsmysnoopy.blogspot.com), but the Reader's Digest version is that we traveled from Chino Hills to San Marcos for more tests.

This is the route we took:

And this is how much it cost me:

Taking Snoopy to San Marcos was not exactly in my schedule, either. I had to rearrange Tuesday's writing to meet Wednesday's deadlines early, and then cancel Wednesday's lessons, just to have not one, but two specialists tell me that, theoretically he's healed but realistically he's lame. Since horses can live for over 20 years, it will be a long time before I say, "When this one goes…" Again, upheaval.

The upheaval of pets in my life is what kept animals out of Freezer Burn. I know of many books where animals figure prominently into the storyline, and I love reading them. But I was more than a little anxious about writing a cohesive murder mystery. I actually made an Excel spreadsheet to keep the clues and suspects and subplots straight. Threading an animal into the mix didn't make sense.

We're always told to "write what we know" and I know (and love) animals, but I preferred not to add them to this book. I may add them to another story, but only if they fit into the plot.

Is there anything (a hobby, a skill, a passion) that you know intimately, but choose to keep out of your stories? Why?

Seasoned Greetings!

For those of you who are wondering, I found a good book for my dad for Christmas. I couldn't find one about World War II - frankly, I can't remember which ones I've given him, so that war may be history for gift-giving. So I settled on the Depression, somehow fitting for his personality. It's The Forgotten Man, in large print. We'll see if he likes it.

In the meantime, I have boxes of decorations cramming my living room, all screaming for me to get them out and put them on display. We got the tree on Sunday - I've discovered I'm extremely allergic to it, but I've got to trim it anyway. But what am I doing instead?

The annual Christmas letter.

This is how I began my foray into writing. About 9 years ago, I told Dale I wanted to write books, so he got me a laptop for Christmas. I piddled about with it for a few months, writing a snippet here and a paragraph there, but mostly using it for engineer-type work. Then, when Christmas rolled around and I thought of the sameness of all the notes I wrote in each card, I decided to try my hand at a Christmas letter. Not the kind where boasts are made about everyone's achievements, but not a parody, where the house burns down and the kids flunk out of school. Just something light and airy, with a little humor and a lot of gratitude that our house didn't burn down and our son is still learning. Most important, it needed to be one-page.

I was completely shocked at the response. Everyone who received a letter thought it was the best one they'd ever read. It began a holiday tradition - what would be in Gayle's letter this year? Family squabbles ensued, when spouses would bait their letter-writing mates with, "Why can't you write a letter like Gayle's?" One year, one of Dale's cousins told me, "I hope you're writing more than just this letter. You should write a book."

What a great idea!

I've posted this year's letter and photo on my website: http://www.gaylecarline.com/gcxmas08.html. Between you and me, I've read better and funnier letters, but this one's okay.

As for the photo, we managed to get the picture taken in only 1/2 hour and 16 shots. You see, Frostie (the red horse) kept trying to bite Mikey (the dog) on the toes, which made him try to jump from the table. So we swapped him and Katy (the cat), whom Frostie immediately tried to vacuum with her nose. My husband, Dale, is pushing her head away from the cat, who would like to kill us all for putting her through this indignity. The only one behaving is the black horse (Snoopy), who is usually the nippy one. For those of you who know horses, the chain across his nose explains his good behavior. We do this every year!

Happy Holidays!