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.

Hinting at the Future

Chief

Chief, a gentle and willing gelding, came into my life
when I was thirteen.  Folks would point to the brand on his neck and say, "See? Chief was an Army horse. And the "S" branded below the number meant he made Sargent."


One man told me I could "write to Washington" and armed with this brand, they could tell me all about my horse.

The picture I took showing Chief brand
(1248) to send to Washington

I did and "they" did. Turns out he was a Morgan Horse that the Army purchased in Texas. However, the "S" stood for "surplus."

Through the years Chief and I roamed the Adirondack Mountains, often road ten miles across town to ride with others, took part of every parade my town of Lake Placid had. I even found a college where I could take Chief with me.  I can't recall a less than perfect day with Chief and probably because of that I knew I never wanted anything but Morgan Horses in my life.

In a high school English class, that spent an entire semester studying Shakespeare, one of the assignments was to write something in Shakesperian style.  That was easy. Of course Chief was my subject:

Chief's birthday was always celebrated
with a homemade carrot cake
extra carrots added!

They called him by the name of Chief
And Chief he certainly was.
For kindness, poise and quality
No better could there be.
(lots more to my sonnet, but this is how it ends:)
And one white foot was needed all
To make me want for ere.
This noble beast.
This Morgan horse
To be surpassed by none.


Years later, after marrying my horse-trainer-husband, it became my job to fill out the horse show entry forms. The horse show association (AHSA back then) required that the trainer be identified and his AHSA number included. 

On a trail ride in VT with a
friend. Note all the horses
in the background.

Kinda still gives me goosebumps to think that my first horse's brand was exactly the same as my husband's AHSA number. And that my wonderful experiences with Chief kept me in the Morgan Horse world where I would run across the man that became my husband.

L. R. Trovillion
www.lrtrovillion.com

It is my turn to post and it happens to be Mother's Day. I would be remiss if I ignored the opportunity to say something about the influence of mothers on this, their day.  I'm posting a picture of my mother that I especially like because it was a time when she was young and happy and had all the promise of life in front of her...also, because she is sitting on a horse.

My mother was not an accomplished horsewoman, but she had a love of horses, especially in her youth.  I hope I've passed that on to my own daughter, whose first horseback riding experience was "in utero" (perhaps not such a smart idea) and who later spent years in pony club, junior equestrian teams, and eventing.  By high school she traded in her ratcatcher and boots for a rugby shirt and cleats, but I believe her years of riding, training, and showing horses gave her a certain mental toughness that is hard to duplicate. More than that, competing in a sport with a horse--another living thing as your partner--teaches you that you are not the center of the universe.  This is often a critical lesson to learn during certain teenaged years. Thank-you to the horses. Here's a picture of me and my daughter from years ago, at a time when we were both able to enjoy riding together. (Yes, I know my hair should be tied up under the helmet. I had taken it off, and just popped it back on to mount and pose for the picture.) 

Horses have figured in the mother-daughter relationship in our family for two generations now, so it is no happenstance, I suppose, that it figures prominently in my novel, False Gods. Relations between mothers and daughters have been endlessly explored, examined, picked and pulled apart under the microscope of the novelist as well as the movie producer.  It has provided rich, fertile ground to till for stories...and yet, there always seems to be more to say about the myriad and diverse relationships between these two female family members.  The mother in False Gods has difficulty with her two daughters, but instead of it being the teenagers who are the troubled ones, it is instead the mother who suffers from emotional problems to the extent that she doesn't even notice the damage she's inflicting until it is almost too late. I won't give anything more away, except... speaking of giveaways (warning: this is where the self-promotion comes in), a contest is now running on Goodreads until May 13th to win one of seven copies of False Gods for free.  I'd love to hear what other people have to say about their mothers, their relationships, and whether horses were a part of it. 

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23846365-false-gods?from_search=true&search_version=service