Surviving Adolescence: Riding!

***The WINNER of the Daphne Grab giveaway is…LENORE! Congrats! You have 48 hours to email me with your name and info of where you’d like your book shipped so I can pass the info to Daphne. If I don’t hear from you by then, I have to draw a new winner. Thanks, Daphne, for an awesome giveaway!***

For me, growing up in the 90s meant one thing…horses!

After school, I couldn’t wait to get out to the stables and ride, groom and learn how to train horses. I lived in a small suburban part of Tennessee (Greenbrier) and was lucky enough to have this riding arena right behind my house. When I did homework after school, I could look out and watch boarders ride and train their horses. I often had to move to the front of the house so I stopped watching them out the back windows.

That Appaloosa, AJ, was my first lesson horse. Oh, he was old and yes, he was was stubborn. But he was the best teacher. He taught me how to be a rider and how to listen to a horse’s needs. He was a great partner and he helped me learn how to impress the girls at my new school with my riding skills. 🙂

Before we moved to Tennessee, we lived in Ocala, FL. This was a horse from a horse fair my family and I attended. I made my parents sooo nervous because I was always walking up to strange horses (even the occasional stallion!) and talking to them. I was a tiny kid, but if you had a horse, I’d ask for a boost so I could ride.

One of my absolute favorite horsey things to do was trail ride. My friend Amy and I would take our horses into the woods and get lost riding. We guided our horses through people’s backyards (Sorry!), over creeks (Kind of dumb, now that I think about it) and along roads that saw a car a day. That was in the mid-90s and before cell phones were so inexpensive. Imagine how far my mom would have let me ride if I’d had a cell!

Horses were my most precious thing during childhood. They gave me the inspiration to write Take the Reins and the rest of the Canterwood Crest books. Name something from your childhood that inspires your writing.