Life, Lived

(This post originally appeared in full on my LinkedIn 8/15/2025)

I could not have written More Today Than Yesterday in my 20s.  

A key component of that story is the horses, and I hadn’t owned a horse before.

That changed in 2008. A few months after we bought our house we bought a paint mare for my husband. Originally we were going to share, but she and I never reached an understanding.

About two years later we bought a Tennessee walking horse mare from the kill pen at a livestock auction. 

It is no exaggeration to say that these two horses became the center of our lives. We structured our time around their care and our leisure around riding them. Our son grew up in the barn and started riding before he could walk.

We had those horses for almost ten years, through the birth of another child and the closing of our home barn. 

This lived experience gave me the depth of knowledge I needed to tell Ruthie’s story, to make it authentic. 

I also think the horses in the novel would not have been the fully realized characters they are if I hadn’t spent so much time at my barn.

Besides More Today Than Yesterday I am seriously working on a couple of stories and outlining a few others. The one that’s farthest along is a YA horror set in the Adirondacks.

A major aspect of this story is canoe camping, another part of my personal lore. My husband and I used to take an annual canoe camping trip upstate.

When we started I was scared of the canoe, to the point where our first trip we didn’t even leave the main lake in case I freaked out and wanted to go home.

Over the next seven years I not only got over my fear but came to love the canoe and how it let us explore places we couldn’t see otherwise.

I’m certainly not saying I wouldn’t have loved being published at 25 and having a shelf full of novels. But THESE particular stories, some of the best things to come out of my brain, would not have been possible without the living I did in those 20 years.