Readers Up #32: Runaway Alex

I started writing horse stories when I was a kid, but in 2010 I decided to actually write The First Novel. You know, the one you finish writing, and let other people read. I knew training and breeding pretty intimately, but spending time on the backside was new to me. So I ended up moving to New York and working as an exercise rider at Aqueduct. The book that came out of that was The Head and Not The Heart, and once I’d published it, I really felt like I’d figured out what I wanted to write. Black Stallion books, but for grown-ups.

So now I’m about a dozen books in, I’ve managed to win a few awards, and I’m pretty committed to this genre! I still have a lot to say about equestrian sports and racing, and instead of fighting with people on Facebook, I do it with fiction.
 

Other People’s Horses played on that angle as well as another one that was bugging me: where racehorses go. Not where they retire, but where they fall before they retire—if they retire. The original title was Cheap Claimers. I’d seen some stuff at Aqueduct and in Ocala, and I wanted to dig into the issue of falling down the levels, getting sent to cheaper tracks, back barns where no one was allowed. I didn’t make anything up—you’d never need to, in horses. And that was how the series progressed: I used the character of Alex to bring these issues to light, to express the way I felt about them without falling back on blog columns or vilifying an entire industry.

Alex likes to argue; I like to argue, but I don’t like doing it in a public forum. So she does it for me.
 

Alex has to learn everything: she comes into the training barn completely fresh and quickly becomes a full-on gallop girl. It’s really that simple—I did it when I was eighteen. You just become immersed in this whole other world. I would love to see more equestrians experience that for themselves, but even just reading about it should open some eyes.
 

Every time I tack up Ben, I look at the bit, at the noseband, at the girth, and wonder if what I’m doing really serves any purpose. It’s always on my mind. Every thinking horse-person should question every move they make that affects another life. I’ve become a very minimalist rider over the years because of this. I don’t wrap legs, I rarely jump, Ben’s mane is like two feet long. I wonder about all these rituals, what they’re all for, and I think later Alex really begins to reflect my personal conflict.

It was hard. It was hard work to write, it was hard work to revise. Something that I’ve lost this year was shower-time. It’s like cleaning stalls—you have a plot problem, you clean a stall or you take a long shower and you can work out the problem. Now when I get in the shower I just think angrily about the state of the pandemic. So I lost all of that critical thinking time, all of those eureka moments. I had to work harder for everything I wrote.