New Equestrian Fiction: Show Barn Blues

by Natalie Keller Reinert

The newest novel in my equestrian line-up.

Ready for a new read? Just in time for... fall? Is that a thing to be just in time for? Anyway, just in time for you to read, I have new equestrian fiction for you!

Show Barn Blues is my latest horse book for grown-ups, a story about surviving in the horse business, the changing nature of our countryside, boarding stable drama, and our connections with our horses. It's a story full of characters anyone who has ever stepped foot inside a barn will recognize. It's a story about horse-people.

From the back cover, here's what Show Barn Blues is all about:

Grace has built her life on show horses. It's been a good life, too -- she mounts her wealthy students on European warmbloods, competes her horses on Florida's rigorous A-circuit, and runs the nicest barn in the neighborhood. Then, suddenly, it's the only barn in the neighborhood. 

As Grace's country town becomes a sun-drenched playground of pools and golf courses, she vows that no bulldozer will ever touch her farm. With her neighbors selling their farms and moving to more isolated corners of Florida, she finds herself fighting off land-hungry developers alone -- until Kennedy comes along. 

Kennedy is everything Grace doesn't want around her bustling show barn -- a pleasure rider who would rather wander in the woods than tackle a show-jumping course. Kennedy might make for an unlikely sidekick, but she's just the inspiration Grace needs to fight back against the developers who want to bulldoze her corner of Floridian wilderness -- and, eventually, against the wilderness itself.

I really think that you'll enjoy this novel, and the first reviewers back me up on this:

You are one of a very few authors who "get" what makes horse-people tick.

-Amazon review

If you like equestrian fiction -- or any fiction with a helluva good story -- this book will satisfy, and then some. 

-Amazon review 

Show Barn Blues also holds a place in the Ambition universe. If you're looking for more Jules, I'm working on the sequel to Ambition now -- but you'll find that Show Barn Blues is connected to her story as well.

You can find Show Barn Blues as an ebook at Amazon right now, with a paperback edition coming next week. If you're a member of Amazon Prime, you can borrow the ebook for free.

I hope you'll take a look and let me know what you think!

Show Barn Blues

by Natalie Keller Reinert

Wow! I am really bad at editorial calendars! 

You're supposed to decide what you're going to write, write it, edit it, and release it, right? Simple. For normal people.

Here's what I decided to do instead.

Write a novel.

Shelve it.

Write another novel, using characters from the shelved novel.

Decide I still really liked the shelved novel.

Edit the shelved novel to publish first.

Plan on changing second novel to make room for changes based upon the shelved novel.

DOES THIS MAKE SENSE?

Of course it doesn't.

I'm a writer and I don't have to make sense.

I know, I know, excuses, excuses. But this way you get two novels out of it, so I'm not sure what grounds anyone has to complain...

So here's the deal.

I based Show Barn Blues on big boarding stables I've worked at.

I'm working on Pride, the sequel to Ambition, featuring characters and plot lines from Show Barn Blues, a stand-alone novel that I wrote last summer but didn't publish. The thing was (as I wrote at my blog back in May), there were events and sequences in Show Barn Blues that I simply couldn't replicate in Pride. The sub-plot of developing farm land into golf courses, and what drives a trainer to continue in the business long after the thrill has gone, were too big to wedge into Pride, which is really about giving up control. Those two things don't blend at all.

I wanted to release Pride first because so many people have asked for it, and I respect that, but Show Barn Blues really has so much to offer. Grace Carter, a middle-aged hunter/jumper trainer, has given her life to the show business, trying to escape a childhood nightmare that never would have happened if she had stayed in the arena as she'd been told. At the same time, she is preserving her grandfather's old farm, the scene of her happiest memories. She's caught in the middle, trying to save the land that she wants nothing to do with. As developers circle her farm, Grace is trying to somehow salvage her future while accepting her past. Meanwhile, a new trail-riding boarder, Kennedy, is determined to change things for Grace and her arena-bound students.

This is a sample of Grace's point of view:

***

The next day, Colleen cancelled her Sunday evening lesson to take Bailey on a trail ride with Kennedy. I was already furious when Missy Ormond showed up to ride in a pair of jeans, which was strongly discouraged — I liked my students to have a professional appearance at all times — and I nearly spit nails when, while wiping off her tack after her riding lesson, she suggested that we all have a group trail ride in a few weeks.

I had been mulling over a new cancellation fee for all riding lessons. “What’s that?” I snapped, but Missy was so excited, she didn’t notice my tone.

“With a barbecue,” she went on enthusiastically. “We could use that old fire-pit, and roast marshmallows. Or make s’mores.”

“What old fire-pit?” I knew exactly where my grandfather’s fire-pit had been dug and bricked, but nobody else knew about it. Rather, nobody else had known about it. Was Kennedy going to dig out all of my skeletons and parade them around in front of me? I put things deep into closets for a reason.

Missy didn’t notice my sudden tension. She hopped down from Donner and ran up her stirrups. “It’s out by the lake,” she explained. “We could all ride to the lake and maybe the grooms or anyone who doesn’t want to ride can take out supplies and wait for us with the Gator. It’s an easy ride. It’s practically a road. Did you know there’s a road out there?”

“It’s an old Indian trail,” I muttered, and everyone in the tack room started clamoring to see it, unable to believe I had denied them the opportunity to ride on a real live Indian trail. “That lake has gators in it,” I added. “And moccasins.”

“So does all the water in Florida,” Missy said, cocky after a good ride. She’d gotten Donner around a three foot nine course without any dirty stops at all — Donner was known for dropping his shoulder when he did not feel that his rider was paying sufficient attention, sending said rider tumbling into the fence while he went the other way. “I might not have lived here my whole life, but I know that. Have you been to Gatorland Zoo? I held a baby gator there. It had its mouth taped shut.”

I had, but when I was ten or eleven, not when I was forty-four years old and the mother of three. “The gators out at the pond will not have their jaws taped shut,” I reminded her. “And horses don’t like them.”

“Oh, they’ll swim away when we come,” Missy laughed. “Kennedy says they’re afraid of horses.” She turned and led Donner back to the barn, his hooves ringing on the concrete pathway, the one we’d constructed over a perfectly good pathway of sand so that the boarders could keep their boots clean. I’d gone to insane lengths to provide affluent equestrians with a picture-perfect equine utopia, and now they all wanted to do was mess around in the woods and look at alligators. One had to wonder what the point of anything was.

***

This story is uniquely Floridian, and uniquely equestrian (as I hope that all of my stories have been). Whether you've devoted your life to horses or you've been an enthusiast, you'll recognize Grace, Kennedy, and the cast of boarders and students who make up the show barn at Seabreeze Stables. And if you've ever seen a "coming soon" sign go up in front of beloved woodlands, you'll be ready to fight alongside Grace to save the farm and everything that it stands for.

And I promise you, once I've finished Show Barn Blues and you're all distracted reading about Grace and friends, I'll finish Pride. Grace meets Jules. Oh, the fireworks.

The Reader Appreciation Club

by Natalie Keller Reinert

Some writers (more successful ones than me!) have fan clubs. I want to go the other way, and start a Reader Appreciation Club.

You can join the Reader Appreciation Club if you write a helpful review of a book, that doesn't include any plot spoilers but just lets potential readers know why you liked it, so that they can decide if they would like it. You can join the club if you tweet or post on Facebook about a book that you can't put down. You can join the club if you send the author an email or a Facebook message or tag them in an Instagram photo or just in any way possible let the author know that someone's reading the author's book, and that someone likes the author's book.

If you take a book on vacation, tell the author!
From Reader Appreciation Society Charter Member Summer T.

Then once you're in the club I'll shower you with praise, send you chocolates, and ask you to cheer me up when I'm feeling down.

Because that's how you got into the club. Not because you sold books for me, or made my book more visible to buyers, or even because you said nice things about my book. The members of my Reader Appreciation Club (imaginary, because I live in Florida and mailing chocolates would be messy) get to join because they let me know that they're reading the book. "Hey Natalie, you know that entire summer you spent indoors editing a novel? I read it."

As an author I don't get a pat on the back from my boss.

I don't get to chat with anyone in the break room at lunch time.

I don't even see my customers (as someone with a retail/hospitality background, this one is particularly tough!). Basically, you're all just highly theoretical to me until someone actually sends me that email, or tags me in that Instagram photo of my book visiting the Bahamas as a beach read, or writes that review at a booksellers' website.

Sometimes it feels like I'm sending my work out into a void, hunching over something, obsessing over something, for months and even years, and then... just waiting. Waiting for a little proof that someone read it, that my work resonated with someone, that all that work matters.

"You know that entire summer you spent indoors editing a novel? I read it. You exist. It exists. That summer mattered."

Writers and websites like Goodreads will tell you that writing a review helps an author sell books, and that makes it a nice thing to do for an author that you like. And that's true -- don't get me wrong.

This is all a review needs to be, to be helpful to readers and precious to authors! Welcome to the club, Morganmom!

But even when someone isn't comfortable writing a review, or they don't have time, or they don't have an account with Amazon after all so that 500-word review they just wrote has just been deleted and never again *%&*#((D!! -- just letting the writer know, in some small way, that someone has actually read that work they sent out into the void months ago, or years ago... that's all you need to get into my Reader Appreciation Society. (Imaginary.)

Thanks to everyone who has ever emailed me, tagged me, tweeted me, written me a review... thanks to all of you. You're my pat on the back from my boss, and you're my chat in the break room, and you're my validation that all this work matters.

You guys rock, and you totally deserve chocolates.

A Writer-Friendly Lifestyle

by Natalie Keller Reinert

When time grows scarce, ideas grow like weeds.

I'll admit it, I haven't been writing much lately. Life just feels a little insane. Starting to work a day job, instead of puttering from one freelance assignment to the next, was supposed to make things easier. Thing was, I still had too many freelance assignments, and I was putting those off at night because I had "worked" all day.

(I have to put work in quotation marks because fiddling with papers at a desk, although technically work, was hardly using the parts of my brain that I used for writing. I was worn out with boredom, not with the actual job.)

Horses on the brain. That's me.

So while I was glaring at my work computer screen, or coming home at night and crashing on the couch to do some serious vegging out with The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, of course I was having all kinds of ideas. Since I wasn't writing anything, my creative side was going haywire.

I was thinking about the next eventing novel (the follow-up to Ambition), the next Alex novel, this middle grade and/or young adult book Kissimmee Katie that I've been playing with, even DREAMING a plot loosely based on a book I started writing two years ago and put to one side. In the dream, the book was published, a beautiful blue paperback with silver lettering, and it had a new title that I liked much better than the working title. I made a note of it in my phone - A Door Opens - and went on vegging on the couch.

I know! My inner muse is calling and I'm not picking up!

It became really obvious that this 8-5 office jazz was not good for my creative side. The boredom was draining all my interest in writing, even while my brain was screaming ALL THE IDEAS! I needed a writer-friendly lifestyle, pronto.

So, I'm making a change. I decided to change jobs for one that's more fun, involves more interaction with people (something I desperately need as a writer!) and has less routine hours. I'm wrapping up most of my freelance work, including my travel business, which has been a huge part of my life for the past two years but has also taken a tremendous amount of time. 

The thing is, ideas are just one thing. They're the easy part. The writing, the fleshing out of characters, the quirks of personality, the inflections of speech, those are the hard bits. For that, you need stimulating atmospheres, people to talk with, conversations to listen to, individuals to observe. I find that people are hard. Horses? I can create a shedrow full of unique and recognizable horses in ten minutes. For people I have to get out there and mingle.

(Or at least watch from a safe distance.)

So here goes nothing. New job, new lifestyle, new schedule -- and hopefully a load of new books! I'm already writing more just out of anticipation of the change -- pages and pages of Pride, the sequel to Ambition, have materialized this week!

Very Flawed Characters

by Natalie Keller Reinert

I want to piggyback off Kate Lattey's post earlier this week, "Writing Strong Female Characters." If you haven't read this post, and you're interested in the technical side of writing, definitely check it out. Go ahead. I'll wait.

You're back? Great. So, here's the thing: I have a history of writing particularly difficult female characters. Not really on purpose... they just are that way.

Alex takes a lot of flack for not being strong enough
 in The Head and Not The Heart.
But give her time. It's a series.

A lot of female characters are reluctant heroines. Think of Katniss standing up and announcing that she'll stand as tribute (or whatever she said, I only saw the movie, true fact). She didn't want to go be a human sacrifice in a particularly nasty bit of child pit-fighting, she was just aware that she was the one for the job. She was the toughest, strongest, mightiest teenager in all the land, or certainly more so than her little sister, so she did what she had to do.

Or look at the character Kris in Lattey's blog's post: "Kris is a pillar of strength, although she never sees herself that way, and (for me at least), is one of the most inspiring characters I've ever written."

Two young women who stood up and did what they had to do with a minimum of complaint. Admirable. I wish I was that sort of person, but I complain when I have to wash the dishes.

I have two main female characters in my two equestrian series: Alex, and Jules. Alex is trying to define herself in a world that does not respect her, which would be fine, if only she respected herself a little more. Jules is trying to show the world that she's the best rider in the world, which would be fine, if only she realized that she wasn't, not yet, anyway.

These flawed personalities manifest themselves in all sorts of moments that don't fit into the traditional Strong Female Character mold. It makes some people crazy, and I really don't blame them. But for others, it makes Alex and Jules incredibly realistic... sometimes maddeningly so.

As a writer, I really just set out to create characters and situations that I find realistic. Things that could happen to any of us as equestrians -- that's my number one inspiration. I never sat down and said to myself, "Alex is this sort of character and has these sorts of flaws and these sorts of attributes." It's just what happened. And so I've learned from reader reviews what sort of characters I have created.

People say...

Jules' focus on her career and distrust of
others really rubs some people the wrong way.
I look at her as a challenge. Jules, how are we
going to fix you? I'm working on that
problem now, as I write her next book.

"Her characters are so alive that I found myself mentally arguing with them over their choices as I read." - Amazon review, Turning For Home.

"It is beautifully written with strong and flawed characters... I also love how complicated Alex is. You just want to shake her half the time and admire her orneriness the other times." - Amazon review, Turning For Home.

"I became so engrossed in the characters, both human and equine, that they felt very real to me, and I cared about them. Even Jules, the main character, whose behavior at the beginning of the story is less-than-stellar (and who we occasionally want to strangle) is a compelling character, because we want to see her grow, change, and learn to accept advice, criticism, love, and friendship." - Linda Benson on Ambition.

"Our main character Jules plants the seeds of her own destruction, as do so many." - Karen McGoldrick on Ambition.

"I found the main character very unlikable, selfish and irritating." - Amazon review, Ambition.

Well, to be fair, nobody likes everybody.

Are Jules and Alex still Strong Female Characters, despite their all-too-average-human tendencies to make bad choices and completely fail at interpersonal relationships? I think so. They still have to overcome monumental challenges in their lives. They still have to step up and take control when there's no one else to do the job. I suppose they're still Reluctant Heroines… just more reluctant than most. They're growing into their roles -- and that's what the books are all about.

Almost Double Digits: My 9th Equestrian Novel Arrives

by Natalie Keller Reinert

UPDATE! TURNING FOR HOME IS NOW AVAILABLE! 

Next week, I send my ninth book into the world.

My ninth. Book. What? That's madness. But there they are, lined up on my author pages at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, my own website... nine books!

Turning For Home - my newest release

I started this craziness in 2011 with the publication of The Head and Not The Heart, but of course there were years worth of books written before this. Notebooks and floppy discs and CD-Rs full of other books. From the moment I could put words down on paper, I was writing stories. I remember writing a very detailed anthology of Black Beauty family stories in a pair of three-subject notebooks. That might have been fourth grade? I remember writing a full-length novel set on a farm in Virginia in a heavy early-model laptop that subsequently died, taking my first novel with it. That was the summer I turned sixteen.

I'm so lucky -- we're all so lucky -- to live in an age when publishing's gatekeepers are falling to the wayside, and anyone who wants to tell a story, can tell a story. I don't know about you, but I was getting pretty tired of what passed for horse stories not too long ago. In mass-produced fiction, horses always seem to be background noise to a love story or a murder, and they always seem to be doing the same thing -- colicking, foundering, winning the Triple Crown despite incredible odds.

Now we have a thriving world of equestrian fiction written for equestrians, where horses are stars in their own rights, not some pieces of landscaping in the background. This is exactly where I want to be -- right smack in the middle of a publishing revival, writers writing about what they love, connecting to readers who feel the same way.

Telling stories is my greatest pleasure. I don't try to write difficult, trendsetting, culturally subversive works that make readers change the way they look at the world. I'm not going after literature prizes here. Don't get me wrong -- I like literature. I like difficult, trendsetting, culturally subversive works. But my job is to tell stories, mainly about Thoroughbreds, because I love them, and I want everyone else to love them too. (Is that so much to ask?)

I guess in that, I'm riding a trend a little bit. After all, retired racehorses are coming back in a big way! Look, they're even getting their own magazine!

Photo: Retired Racehorse Project

Retired racehorses have always been my passion, but this is the first book I've written about the actual moment of retirement, and the question of "What do we do with this horse now?" Turning For Home centers around Tiger, the horse that gave Alex new hope in The Head and Not The Heart, and the challenges surrounding his retirement from the track.

Turning For Home also takes a look at the good, and the bad, in both racing and Thoroughbred aftercare.

I don't know if Turning For Home answers any questions, or if it is culturally subversive, or any of that previously mentioned literary gobbledegook. I do think it's a good story, and a story that so many equestrians like me can relate to.

What happens to our horses? Where do they all go? How can we protect them? When Alex asks those questions, I know she's not alone. I know there's a chorus of us out there, those words echoing in our brains.

In my acknowledgements, I thank a couple of retirement organizations for their help, whether they inspired scenes in the book, or have been an integral part of my writing career. Here's a shout-out for them now:

The Retired Racehorse Project, who seemed to rise up just as I was getting out of the training business, and their Thoroughbred Makeover. I want to do a Thoroughbred Makeover so bad. I have to be content with inventing one for Alex.

Thoroughbred Retirement of Tampa (T.R.O.T.), who helped me with my very first author event, right at Tampa Bay Downs. Their volunteers inspire me every day.

Hidden Acres Rescue For Thoroughbreds (HART), whom I see a lot less often than I would like. Just a few miles from the woods and fields where I used to ride my first Thoroughbred, they're busy bringing in Thoroughbreds who need help, teaching them manners and jobs, and finding them forever homes. I promise I'll be back really soon!

And before I go, a shout-out to my wonderful cover designer, who created Turning For Home's striking cover image, and asked that I make a donation to an equine charity in lieu of payment. You're amazing, and I'm making that donation to HART, my hometown's Thoroughbred aftercare heroes.

Turning For Home will be released in digital format everywhere you buy books on March 3rd is now available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Scribd, Page Foundry, and elsewhere, with a paperback edition coming soon. You can read the first chapter here at my website, and order a Kindle edition at Amazon from the link below.

I'm so excited to share this one with you! Be sure to keep in touch and let me know what you think. I'm writing these for all of us. And I'm about to get busy on book number ten...

Writing about racehorses, and their retirement

Retired Racehorse: 19 year old broodmare Wicket

by Natalie Keller Reinert

I started writing about racehorses in 2009, living on a farm surrounded by retired racehorses.

Their past lives fascinated me. Every retired racehorse, young and old, calm and spooky, silly and mature, carries with them a remarkable story. I mean, have you been to the races? Have you seen the massive scale of the architecture, the tracks that dwarf humans, the tunnels lined with windows that horses march through on their way out to the race? It's about as far from farm life, the life we associate with horses, as anything could be. And racehorses, from a young age, live with that kind of crazy every day.

And they just live with it. They eat their hay and they beg for peppermints and they go out for rides just like any other horse, in any other place, in any other life. Some thrive on the fast pace; some are just waiting until they can slow down on the farm again. But they are capable of great tolerance for things that many horses would simply freak out over.

As horsemen we ask our horses to do things that make them react as if we're delusional fairly regularly.

- Step up on that rubber mat for a bath. What, are you crazy? That mat is obviously going to eat me! 

- Hop over this cross-rail of plain brown poles. And risk being devoured by a cross-rail of DEATH?

- Stand still for a second while I run these tiny buzzing clippers around your ears. UM LOL ROFL!

- I swear that tortoise up ahead isn't going to hurt you. Can't hear you running the other way too fast!

Seriously, horses are all about every day drama. Even retired racehorses. And they're really just playing with you, because they've seen it all, and done it all. They've stepped on rubber mats and they've stepped over poles and they've been clipped and...

Well, they probably haven't seen any tortoises.

Although they may be pretty familiar with goats and pigs from their racetrack lives. And with roosters, and cats. With bicycles and motorbikes. With rumbling commuter trains and crackling loudspeakers.

It's a funny life, the racetrack life.

So I sat and I thought about their past lives, and wrote about them, for years. I wrote The Head and Not The Heart, which goes from the sweet country life in Ocala to the gritty racetrack life in NYC, then Other People's Horses, which takes place in that happiest of happy mediums between farm and races, Saratoga Springs.

Maybe it was inevitable that after writing those books, and living in NYC myself, I started craving a slow-down. Time for a lay-off, a little time back at the farm. I wrote Ambition, about eventing with retired racehorses, about farm life, about working hard for what you want, come whatever odds.

And then I decided to concentrate on those uncertain days between a horse's last race and a horse's new career. The retired racehorse, at the moment he's retired -- that's the subject of my new book, coming this spring: Turning For Home. 

How does a racehorse feel, when he's suddenly taken home and turned out? How does a racehorse react, when he's laid off from the only job he knows? How does a trainer feel, when her horse leaves her barn? What does the horse do next, and who is going to teach it to him? What happens to a retired racehorse?

First ride off the track on an OTTB.

Alex is retiring Tiger -- you might have met Tiger and Alex in The Head and Not The Heart, a few years ago -- and nothing about it seems simple. He knows everything about being a racehorse, and nothing about being a riding horse. Together, they have to figure out how to live and work in a new world.

I wrote about retired racehorses long before I wrote The Head and Not The Heart. Before I was writing back-stories, I was writing their current stories. In my old blog Retired Racehorse (archives are at RetiredRacehorseBlog.wordpress.com, but with lots of broken links - you've been warned), I wrote about retraining a racehorse, fresh off the training center, into a successful sport-horse. I also wrote about my broodmares, themselves retired racehorses, and all their quirks and sillies and moments of brilliance.

Turning For Home is a return to those retirement stories. What happens, when you retire a racehorse?

____

While I'm preparing Turning For Home for publication, I'm sharing retired racehorse true stories at my Facebook page, Retired Racehorse Blog. Have a horse you're prepping for the 2015 Retired Racehorse Project Thoroughbred Makeover? Share your website or FB page with readers there. Have an OTTB with a story you've just got to tell? Post over at Retired Racehorse Blog and share your story. That's Facebook.com/RetiredRacehorseBlog.