In Loving Memory: AB the One Dollar Wonder Horse

 

I waited a month to write this, and still made myself cry. But I felt like I needed to write it. As thrilled as I am to always celebrate the record-setting, sport-defining horses who achieve greatness, I think it’s equally important that the unfamous, wonderful horses who enrich are lives receive their flowers, too.

I met AB in September of 2011. The herd at that time consisted of the two minis, my 15-year-old Dutch warmblood gelding, Markus, and my first horse, Skip, who’d turned 27 in June. I went down to feed and turn out one morning before class—it was my last semester at KSU—and knew immediately that something was seriously wrong with Skip. He was on his feet, but he had zero interest in breakfast. His breathing was elevated, and based on the state of his stall, and his filthy coat, he’d been down and thrashing for God knows how long. He’d been fine at night check, but that morning, he was in the grips of a nasty colic. I immediately administered Banamine and put in an emergency call to the vet.

Then I called my mom, because I already had that unpleasant tingling in the back of my mind: this was the big one. If he didn’t need to be put down on the spot, there was an immediate trip to a university hospital in our future.

When the vet arrived, she tubed him, and searched rectally for an impaction. Within minutes, she was asking if I wanted to take him to Auburn or UGA. The farm’s much closer to the Alabama state line than Athens, and it’s an easier, less congested trip to go west, so I told her to call Auburn. We loaded Skip up in the trailer, and headed out.

What followed was an incredibly stressful day spent in the Auburn equine hospital’s waiting room, watching Friends reruns on the TV mounted up in the corner. The staff at the desk asked if I wanted the remote to change the channel; I didn’t care. I was happy to have a laugh track in the background, and to this day, I find Friends immeasurably comforting in tense times. I dropped the entirety of my student aid check as a surgery deposit that day; I didn’t buy a single book that last semester of school, and a friend was kind enough to let me take photocopies of pertinent sections in the student center.

Skip survived his surgery, but he would never make it home. We didn’t know that the first night, when we headed home after dark, wrung-out and, in my case, dizzy from low blood sugar. We didn’t know that his gut would fail to restart, and that he would fade, and that, within a week, he would be helped across the rainbow bridge far from home, in the care of strangers. But we did know one thing: Markus couldn’t be alone. By some miracle, he’d tolerated staying stalled all day with only the minis next door for company, but the next day, he would need to be turned out, and even if Skip recovered and came home, Markus would need a pasture companion, because Skip would be on stall rest for weeks.

“I wonder if we could borrow a horse for a little while,” my mom said. It was too late that night to call around and see, but we started first thing the next morning.

This was before I had a Facebook account; today, I could hop into a horse group there, drop an “ISO” post, and have kind strangers DMing me photos of companion horses within minutes. But that day, I wound up sitting in a camp chair in the middle of the paddock while Markus stood over me, rubbing my head with his lip and occasionally whinnying for a friend who wasn’t there.

“Why don’t we call Brandi?” my mom asked around midday, after a fruitless morning making calls. Brandi had leased, and then sold Markus to me, and owned a boarding facility not too far away. It was worth a shot—and turned out to be the very best thing to come out of a hellish week.

“Forget borrow, I’ve got a horse you can have,” she told us.

I put Markus back in his stall beside the minis, because he was not content to stay outside alone, we hooked the trailer back up, and off we went an hour and a half south to meet this horse to have, ready to take her home no matter what she looked like. Desperate times, and so forth.

We arrived to find that Brandi already had AB’s halter, rain sheet, feed can, and bridle packed up and ready to go. As for AB herself, she proved to be a gray, ten-year-old Hanoverian/Quarter Horse cross who was registered as a Canadian Sporthorse. She’d been born in Canada, Brandi explained, and used as a broodmare in the past, but was broke to ride and knew a little dressage. She’d also been pastured with Markus before, and Brandi was confident that the two of them would get along. AB was big, well-behaved, easygoing, barefoot (trimming hooves is much less expensive than shoes!), and, fat from late summer grass and in the prime of life, she was beautiful.

When we said it felt wrong to just take her, Brandi said, “Okay. You can buy her for a dollar.” AB loaded like a dream, and we turned north for Riddermark.

And that was how AB the One Dollar Wonder Horse became the steady backbone of the farm for fifteen years.

We didn’t get home until dusk, so there wasn’t time for a proper introduction to the pasture, or even to Markus. As I backed her off the ramp that first night, one of the neighbors set off a volley of fireworks. Forget that it was neither full dark, nor a holiday—no one needs an excuse for fireworks where I live. “Oh, shit,” I muttered, and choked up on the lead line. Some horses are petrified of fireworks. But AB twitched an ear in a bored way. Huh. And walked quietly to her stall. Ate her dinner. Sniffed noses with the minis through the stall wall and got acquainted with them. The next morning, she and Markus went out in the field and it was the safest, least dramatic horse introduction I’ve ever witnessed. Not only was Markus desperate for company, but he must have remembered her, despite having not seen one another in over a year. There were no fireworks, of the horse variety, this time, and peace was restored.

Skip, of course, didn’t make it. But we had been blessed, by sweet Brandi, and by providence, I think, with Miss AB, and she was the perfect companion for my great big Primadonna widowmaker Markus up until his passing in 2019.

AB grieved for him, and I tried to fill the void with lots of treats and attention. But unlike Markus, so long as she had the minis in the next paddock over, she was willing to go out alone. I started horse shopping, but couldn’t find anything suitable within budget—and then Covid hit.

When I started shopping again, I found that horses were even more expensive. I couldn’t afford to by an 8–10-year-old, already-trained horse…nor did I want to introduce the wrong horse, and subject a now Cushing’s diagnosed AB to a territorial or vicious horse in her senior years. I didn’t want a cribber, or a kicker, or a bolter, or a massive behavior problem that would upset our peaceful equilibrium.

So I bought a baby. In 2023, I bought a Quarter Horse filly from my mom’s friend at work, whose family breeds several AQHA foals a year. Kit Kat joined the herd, and for the first time in four years, AB had a friend.

In those four years alone, she’d gotten a little senile, and didn’t seem to know what to do with a friend, especially a young one. She was a hot mess of mama whickering and angry ear pinning, and I spent an entire day in the pasture, ready to intervene if necessary. But Kit Kat is nothing if not fearless and persistent. Freshly weaned from her dam, she decided AB was her new mama/auntie, and wouldn’t take no for an answer when it came to friendship. By day two, they were buds, even if AB liked to play the cranky old timer.

I have no idea why her barn name was “AB.” Her registered name was Aerial’s Southern Snow. It’s considered bad luck to change a horse’s barn name, and I’d had enough of that already. AB it was, then, and I always enjoyed the strange looks people gave me when I told them her name for the first time.

She didn’t have a show record. She didn’t win me any ribbons. She wasn’t famous. She had a truly atrocious canter, and she kept a messy stall. She was also worth her weight in gold, and I’ll be forever grateful that she was a part of my life for fifteen years. Grateful, too, that she had three little friends her last year of life, and that I got to be with her, there at the end.

She’d been showing her age a little more each summer for the last five years or so. Despite medication, she wouldn’t shed out anymore, and I was body-clipping her four times a year. Burning through clipper blades like I was trimming shrubs with them. Her arthritis had worsened, and supplements were no longer helping like they used to. But it was the Cushing’s disease that claimed her. It’s a progressive, incurable disease that can be slowed with medication, but not halted or reversed. Her body was producing far too much cortisol, and, eventually, that amount of stress hormone taxes the heart until congestive heart failure sets in. I knew it was time that morning, a month ago yesterday, when I could hear the fluid in her lungs.

I still round the corner in the mornings expecting to hear her. I still look for her big white back in the pasture, a constant for so long. I still, sometimes, pick up a flake of hay, and head for her stall with it, and then catch myself. The stall is empty. The halter hanging there is too big to fit any of my young girls. AB is gone.

She’s the sixth horse I’ve buried, and I’d love to say it gets easier; instead, I’ll say that it gets easier to accept. It’s no longer shocking, it doesn’t upend your world, but it still hurts the same.

For as long as she lived with me, she was never hungry, never cold; she never suffered. She could always be sure of the routine, of the food, and the field, and that I would come get her if lightning cracked across the sky, and hose her off when she got sweaty. I’d like to think, as I stood with her in that last hour, that she knew she was loved.

Goodnight, sweet girl. We miss you. Give Markus a kiss for me, and I’ll see you later.

Newsletter 5/15/26

 

Since my last newsletter a month ago, Kit Kat’s eye got a little better, and then a little worse; I had to have AB euthanized due to Cushing’s-related heart failure; more than one family member has been into and then out of the hospital; and all that stress caused a nasty flare-up for me a couple weeks ago. At this point, I’m John Belushi at the end of Blues Brothers with all the bad news and excuses: “Locusts!”

As a result, book progress has been slow across the board - but it has been progress.

I’m having to do some retooling on what I have so far with Field of Fire, the seventh and final Drake Chronicles installment, so I don’t have updates on that front. Likewise, The Winter Palace is moving along literally a paragraph at a time. Again: moving, but sluggishly.

My major focus at the moment is on Substack updates, both my standalone romantic suspense Don’t Let Go, and the post-Dartmoor novel Inherent Violence.

Chapter By Chapter

My initial plan - and we all know how those go - was to keep multiple chapters ahead and schedule drops so that I didn’t ever run out of content to post. Obviously, that didn’t pan out as hoped. I’m still ahead on Don’t Let Go - with Chapter 13 dropping this week, I’m a little over halfway through the chunk of novel I wrote last year. I’m posting Inherent Violence as I write it, however.

I like posting chapter by chapter because it helps me stay motivated. Smaller, daily goals and posting as a sense of “getting something done” help me stay energized to power through a whole novel. Obviously, the serial release format isn’t ideal for anyone who wants to binge an entire book; it’s not a seamless experience if you need to go back and check details on earlier chapters when it’s been a while between updates. I get that.

But it gives me a chance to keep y’all entertained week to week, so there aren’t long content droughts between books. It also offers a chance to see the rough draft process. I do a cursory proofread before I post each chapter, but the book in chapter form is fairly raw. If I were to ever publish these stories as books, there would be some editorial changes: likely added spicey scenes, streamlining of others, and maybe even some rewrites.

That’s a big “if,” though. I want to do right by my Substack subscribers, so these stories might need to stay forever on the ‘Stack.

Hopefully, your spring is rocking along more smoothly than mine has. Thanks for being here!

Dartmoor Confessions

 

If you've been following along for a while, it's likely none of these confessions will come as a surprise. I've made them all before, but individually, across a variety of posts. Let's compile them, shall we?

All of the Dartmoor characters are very familiar to me by now. Give me a scenario, and I can tell you how each character would react. But I have an easier, more automatic time slipping into certain skulls, and Ghost's is the easiest. I'm not sure what that says about my personality, and maybe I don't want to know. Ghost would be an integral part of every book, given his president status, but he's also useful when I'm struggling with finding a story attack angle. If I throw him at a problem, I can bull my way through it.

In a subgenre densely populated by 6'4"+ bikers, surely there's a reader or two out there who prefers a short king. Or King, as it were, in Walsh's case. Personal taste aside, uniformity gets boring. I want all the Dogs to be different, with distinct skillsets and personalities. Not only is it more realistic, but it offers a little something for everyone. 

I always, always prefer for the interpersonal drama amongst our "heroes" to be flavored with personal demons and self-doubt as opposed to the outsider-looking-in shock of "oh no, you mean you do illegal stuff?" That morality crisis is boring for me, and so while it's necessary to bring in new blood from outside the club, I run myself ragged with the whys and hows of that transition from civilian to Dog ally/old lady/member. 

What can I say? They're two different flavors of the same brand of gremlin, and that will never not be fun for me. 

#TeaserTuesday: The Bowl

 

I've seen authors argue that beginning a project is the most difficult part, but I'd argue it's finishing one. In the beginning, you're laying down lore and building characters, but sticking the landing takes no small amount of effort and attention to detail.

With Field of Fire, I'm not just ending a book, but a series, and so there are many loose ends to tie up - and hopefully tie up in a satisfying way. 

The scene I'm working on today links back to this scene from Demon of the Dead:

“Then,” Ragnar continued, voice touched with strain, “they brought out this – this bowl.”

Leif lifted his brows.

Ragnar showed his teeth, a quick, unhappy flash that was defensive, rather than aggressive. “It was this massive golden bowl full of black liquid. They made me look into it, and I – I saw things, Leif.” It was the first time he’d said his name in weeks, rather than alpha. “It felt like – like I went somewhere, like I wasn’t inside my body anymore. There was this golden city – it was like nothing I’d ever seen. It made this palace look like a hut, it was so…” He shrank down into himself. “There were drakes. Flying in the air. More than I could count. There were – there were other things. Animals. Maybe? I don’t…”

He shook his head, hard. “When I was standing on my own two feet again, that bastard said, ‘That is the heart of our empire. That is what’s coming for you.’” He deflated. “No one can stand against that. Not even your bloody-minded uncle.” He sighed and wiped both hands down his face, exhausted simply from remembering. 

The fantasy genre offers a chance to explore self-delusion, confusion, and the lies we tell ourselves in a very literal sense. Here's Oliver learning more about the bowl:

“Very well,” Romanus said, and stepped up to the table; gripped its edge and tossed his hair back over his shoulder with a flick of his head. “Come, then.”

“I’m not drinking that.”

“I don’t want you to. Come,” Romanus said again, firmer. “Gaze into the bowl.”

“Do you hear yourself?” Oliver said. “Gaze into the bowl.”

Romanus lifted his brows. “What will you do instead? Return to your shivering, failing body? Lie in fever-wracked misery?”

Oliver could only frown. The last thing he wanted was to return to his physical form; he wanted it even less than he wanted to cooperate with his gods-bedamned grandsire. “What will happen if I gaze into the bowl?” he asked, tightly, but he was already caving, and the flicker of Romanus’s mouth said he knew it.

“You will be shown a truth. It might be the past, and it might be the future. It might be something you want, and it might be something you fear. It’s different for everyone. But it will be true.”

“If it’s a want or a fear, how can it be true? Isn’t that just projection?”

“Is truth not a kind of projection?”

“Gods, you’re insufferable,” Oliver muttered, and stepped up to the table to avoid further semantic discord. “All right. I’m gazing. Now what?” The black liquid—the blood—lay quiet and still in the bowl, not disturbed by the faint breeze that blew in from the balcony. Its surface gleamed, glossy and thick, opaque as midnight. Oliver glimpsed his reflection in it, sunken-eyed and messy-haired. He searched for the now-familiar wink of silver beads in his braids, but there were no braids, and the beads were long gone.

He shuddered. 

If life can calm down for two seconds, I can't wait to get this book finished and into y'all's hands! 

Teaser Tidbit: The Winter Palace

 

I wanted to post this yesterday for Teaser Tuesday, but ran out of time, so we'll do a bonus Wednesday teaser instead. 

I don't know if I've ever fully explained what's going on with The Winter Palace...? So let me do that now. I called it a novella originally, and I'm still not sure whether the page count will land it in that category or not (though I suspect, given my long-winded tendencies with SoR, that it'll easily hit novel length), but I decided several years ago that I had too much content to cram into Lionheart. Hence, The Winter Palace. It takes place in Buffalo, NY, at Trina's family compound out in the woods, and it handles the post Golden Eagle fallout of Nikita's pack. A quiet moment for all of them to catch their breath gains tension by slow degrees until they reach a decision point: keep to themselves? Or commit fully to Vlad's impending war? 

We'll get lots of slow beats, quiet moments, and relationship building amongst our major players. We have a chance to see some new dynamics form between characters, and we explore everyone's powers in a less stressful environment. 

Every time I work on this, I feel like a kid playing with new toys on Christmas day. I love these characters so much, and this book is going to be very self-indulgent, and very fun for anyone who loves them. 

“I forget, sometimes,” she admitted. “That you’re—”

“A campy C-list horror movie villain?”

“Different,” she amended. “And then you’ll say or do something that makes me remember, and it’s…no, don’t,” she said, when he started to say something else. “And then it’s…jarring. For a second.”

His gaze narrowed. “Do people say ‘jarring’ out loud? I’m asking seriously here. I thought that was just shit people said in books.”

“Well,” she said, fighting the tug of a smile. “I’m saying it now.” More seriously: “It’s jarring sometimes. But then I get over it. It’s like…”

A real smile cut across his face, sly and pleased, and she realized he was about to fill in the blank for her.

She sighed. “What?”

“It’s like you’re dating Clark Kent, and then it hits you.” He smacked his hands together. “‘Damn. I’m dating Superman.’” He made a face. “Shit, wait. Superman sucks.”

Trina shook her head and started walking again. “Okay, which superhero does the grown-ass man want his new reality to resemble?”

“Tough call. I’m gonna have to go with Wolverine.”

“Interesting. You going to grow the sideburns out?”

“I’ll have to check with my girlfriend.”

By Its Cover

Any day is a good day to recommend the work of one of my absolute favorite authors, but St. Patrick's Day is an especially good day, given she's Irish. Tana French has a new book dropping on the 31st of this month, and I will most definitely be setting aside all my other reads to attend to it. 

We've all heard "don't judge a book by its cover" before. In the case of my books, it's always meant to imply (or is outright stated) that my covers are lousy and the reader was surprised by their enjoyment of my work. The truth, whether we like it or not, is that covers do matter, which is precisely why I select covers for my work in a very purposeful way. Nine times out of ten, those head-turning, gorgeous book covers frame trite and underwhelming prose. I choose covers for my books that would attract readers like me: covers that make you go "huh, wonder what that's about."

That's what happened when I discovered Tana French for the first time.

I was perusing the aisles of a Borders bookstore, long before Bookstagram and Book Tok wrested control of the book marketing world and started splashing viral book sensations across all of our phone screens. The first novel of Tana French's Dublin Murder Squad series was not featured on an endcap display, nor laid out on a table; it was slotted alphabetically alongside the other mystery novels, easy to miss - and I sometimes shake my head in wonder when I think of missing it - and it was the title that first caught my attention. In the Woods. Simple. Vague in a delightful way. The woods can be so many things: a sun-dappled clearing where a doe sips from a burbling stream; a cozy glen where smoke curls from the stone chimney of a cabin; or it can be a sinister place of crowded tree trunks and shifting shadows. Snapping twigs, hooting owls, rustling underbrush. 

I pulled the book out to catch a peek at the cover. 

Have you ever stood amidst a patch of trees in the winter, tilted your head back, and looked up? I have always found a melancholic enjoyment in the silhouettes of bare tree branches stamped against a white January sky. On the cover of In the Woods, the bare branch aesthetic was subtly foreboding. This, I knew, was no cozy cabin story. 

I turned to the first page, and within two paragraphs knew that no matter the outcome of the plot, Tana French's writing was exquisite. Some fifteen years later, she's still my most-recommended author. Given she's a New York Times bestseller, and far more successful than I'll ever be, I still feel that she's a vastly underappreciated author. I don't see her mentioned on the thriller rec accounts, and rarely encounter a fellow fan in the wild. 

She only puts out one book every two years (don't ever come at me about how slowly I write again, y'all), but the wait is always more than worth it. She writes rich, lyrical literary mysteries full of the most complex, flawed, loveable characters. She tends to take side characters from previous novels and bring them into the spotlight, and manages to shift your opinion of them one-hundred-and-eighty-degrees from one POV to another. 

Happy St. Paddy's Day! Let me know if you give Ms. French's work a try. 

#TeaserTuesday: No Pretending

 

The seventh and final installment of the Drake Chronicles series, Field of Fire, is coming later this year! Get caught up on the first six books now. 

“There can be no pretending, as a drake. Dominance—true dominance—is undeniable. Others give immediate sway to an alpha.”

“Ah.”

“Hm?”

“I see now why you’re eager for me to try it.” Oliver closed the book with a solid thump, filling his face with dust. He sneezed. After, he dabbed his nose on his sleeve. “You want me to learn to shift so that, once we’re both drakes, your alpha nature will compel my less dominant drake to submit.”

Romanus frowned.

“You hope that once I submit on four legs, I’ll fall in line with your plans on two legs.” He held the book back out to him; tried to do so with one hand, but was forced to use both. “You think you’re very clever, don’t you?”

“I think you suspect the worst of me, unwarranted.” Romanus waved his hand through the air, and the book vanished in a curl of smoke.

“I think you are an emperor, first and foremost. If that makes you the worst, that’s all the more reason not to aspire to become an emperor.”