Oreana–Where the Deer and Antelope Play

Friday June 17 2016

Coming to the high desert country of Owyhee County to visit fellow horseback riders, the author decided to make Oreana her home.

I've lived in really big cities, smaller cities, little towns, in the boonies, on the road, and you could even say a tent for a while. It's easy for me to shed one persona and slip into the other, rather inconspicuously and fluidly. I'm comfortable in all of them. But I do have to say that living in less than a town, out in the boonies, with horses of course, is pretty darn nice. 

I always say I live in Owyhee, which is the SW county of Idaho, but the 'town' I'm associated with is barely a blip on the map, and I live outside that town anyway. But it's home. I did a feature profile on Oreana in the June issue of Idaho Magazine. It starts out:

“Oreana—Population 8, Maybe 9.” That hand-painted sign tacked to a telephone pole greeted me as I drove down the hill into the little community of Oreana for the first time in 2005. I’d come to this fairly isolated corner of Owyhee County in southwestern Idaho to visit some endurance horse-riding friends for a week. I stayed on for a month. It took that short a time for the high desert sagebrush country to get under my skin, because two years later, I was back to stay…

And I must say that not all editors are so easy to work with, but I really enjoy writing for and working with Steve, the editor of Idaho magazine. 

You can read the rest of the excerpt here (and the whole article is available for purchase or subscription): 

https://www.idahomagazine.com/article/oreana-spotlight/

My Memoir: Manuscript Edited!

My completed horse-life memoir is back from my editor Pat Barnhart! This after I completed the manuscript at the end of NaNonFiWriMo challenge on November 30th.

I guess I was a non-fiction blogger before my time: as far back as I can remember, I composed true-to-life animal stories, written on paper, illustrated by drawn pictures.

I still possess one of those first animal stories I wrote around age 6, where I drew and carefully scribbled in pencil on paper the story of a little chick, which I shrewdly named "Peep-peep", that my parents gave me. (The drawing was, um, clearly done by a 6-year-old.)

Even though I was born obsessed with horses, since I never got a horse as I was growing up, the true horse stories came much later, when I could at least hang out around horses, and when I got to start working with them on the King Ranch in south Texas.

When my photography hobby started a little later, my horse photos and horse tales naturally coalesced; and since then, I've used both words and images tell my horse stories. Then came the emergence of the traveling bug obsession (I think I'm a throwback to another time and place), and with the merging of those three passions sprouted The Equestrian Vagabond. My horse memoir has long been in the making and the waiting… but now the waiting is over.

I'm not interested in traditional publishing. I like the term "Indie publishing", and I like the concept of creating everything myself. I like the challenge of learning a complete new language and a whole new set of skills, in writing, designing, e-publishing and print publishing, and marketing, by myself. It's an experience I'm enjoying… even though it's a bit intimidating!

To learn how to e-publish, I recently used Scrivener and Ed Ditto's book How to Format Your Novel for Kindle, Nook, the iBookstore, Smashwords, and CreateSpace…in One Afternoon (which took me longer than one afternoon!) to write and e-publish some short stories on Amazon (Racehorse Tales! and Traveler Tales!). The learning experience was enlightening, and the stories are quite successful, which will help a lot in formatting and publishing my memoir as an e-book. Harder will be the printed book, though I have an idea where I'm leaning there.

There's so much to read on-line about Indie publishing - so much that it's hard to filter it all down to even learn which steps to take next. Writer and publisher Joanna Penn's TheCreativePenn.com is both informative and engaging, with how-to articles and videos, and interviews with other successful authors and publishers. It gives the newbies hope and inspiration!

Meanwhile, Stormy and I will be carefully reviewing the manuscript, and gauging the reacting of the helpful horse herd.



The next big steps: getting an ISBN and revealing the title!

Completed! NaNonFiWriMo!

Saturday November 30 2013

November is the month of NaNoWriMo - National Novel Writing Month - and NaNonFiWriMo - National Non-Fiction Writing Month - and on November 1st I committed to finishing my horse-life memoir.

I not only finished it but I sent it off to my editor today!

So far Stormy, a main character in my book, is quite pleased with what he's heard, particularly the chapters about him. So far my editor Pat Barnhart peeked at only the Prologue and…(heart in throat)… she loved it! (Actually the words she used were "LOVE IT LOVE IT LOVE IT!")

The Owyhee herd is excited and can't wait to sit around a campfire this winter and hear some of the stories.

Stay tuned… I will have updates here on my blog, including title, cover photo, inside excerpts, and publishing progress!

Committed: NaNonFiWriMo

Friday November 1 2013

NaNonFiWriMo - for non-fiction writers - developed as a response to fiction writers' NaNoWriMo - National Novel Writing Month.

I can't fiction-write my way out of a tube sock. So, non-fiction it is. I've gone and done it: committed to NaNonFiWriMo - finishing my memoir by the end of November. Parts of it have just been sitting there and ...aging (like a fine wine, perhaps words get better with age?) for …months… years… but now I'm committed to finishing this work of nonfiction in 30 days.

Stormy, The Most Beautiful Horse On The Planet, has been waiting for this commitment for quite some time (for about 20 years). Since he's featured in my memoir, he wants his story out there, "and hurry up already," he added.

And what better time of year but fall, when it's cool and inspirational and most beautiful, with Stormy looking over my shoulder, prodding me along. He'll be monitoring my weekly progress.

I'm sending this blog link to my editor, Pat Barnhart!

Traveler Tales!: The Other Side

Saturday September 7 2013

Writing. Travel. Horses. Photography. Not always in that order, but they've always been intertwined, all spiraled together in my DNA.

I never kept a 'diary' growing up. It was Budget Traveling that started my writing: detailed hand-written journals that I'd spend hours on keeping up at the end of every day, no matter how exhausted I was, be it trekking in the Nepal Himalaya, wading though chaos in India, working on a racehorse farm in Ireland, or after a long day of barfing from rough seas crossing to a Greek island. I wrote, and I wrote.

In addition to the travel journals, I'd hand-write letters (back in the day!) regaling some of these adventures - the funny, scary, ridiculous, amazing, and exasperating - and send them home. They always got great reviews from friends and family. Most were thankful to read about the entertaining adventures, and not have to experience them personally!

Some of these Traveler Tales were so popular, they have now been turned into e-short stories!

The first Traveler Tale: The Other Side, a trek on one of the world's most beautiful - and toughest - hikes on the Annapurna Circuit in Nepal's Himalaya. Some of you originally read this short story as a blog entry on here. It's now off my blog, but available on Amazon, Barnes N' Noble, (and soon),  iTunes and Kobo.

More Traveler Tales are available; they'll be featured soon on here.

And coming soon: Racehorse Tales! I kept journals of my days as a groom on the racetrack. I had a great variety of horses: some that could run like the wind, some that couldn't run a lick; lazy ones, crazy ones, delightful ones, mean ones, funny ones, egotistical ones. More to come on these later.

The Traveler Tales on my website:
http://www.theequestrianvagabond.com/E-Books.html