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Second draft of "The Pretty Horsebreaker" done
The second draft of "The Pretty Horsebreaker" is on its way to Circlet Press. Mainly I strengthened the subtext.

In an odd moment of synchronicity, I read this today in Susanah Breslin's Reverse Cowgirl blog, referring to the new film "The Girlfriend Experience". It goes remarkably well with what I was trying to do with Miss Ccri, the protagonist of my story. She's loosely based on the Victorian courtesan, Catherine "Skittles" Walters. Miss Ccri is famous, but also something of an enigma, distant from others, by the necessities of her profession and her social circle, and even somewhat alienated from her self.

She got called out for being cold or distant or impossible to read by various critics, but I agreed and didn't agree. One: Of course she is; that's how many sex workers are. Two: Simultaneously, of course she's not; she's only that on the surface. I don't know if it was me projecting based on my own experiences with sex workers, but I thought she did that, inadvertently or intentionally: revealed the sort of walking contradiction of sex work: that you are often totally there and very hidden. What appears to be invisible on the inside--if you look closer, is intensely complex beneath the surface. So, she worked for me.

Actually, "enigma" isn't the right word. You consider something enigmatic when it does something you don't expect, but have no theory to explain. If something doesn't apparently do anything unexpected, then it is not enigmatic. So, people can be highly visible to other people who think they know who the first person is, but the first person actually has vast areas of their life that are unknown to anyone else.