Bringing y’all some behind the scenes a bit on the Hooves & Hearts Series today, specifically about the next upcoming book in the series, Heart of Hope.
Pretty much everything you read in my equestrian fiction comes from my real life experiences over the course of a couple of decades. As I’m writing fiction, nothing is a word for word direct account of a particular experience, but I do pull bits and pieces from the experiences I’ve had and from what I’ve learned over the years. In Heart of Hope, a large part of the inspiration for the story comes from one of the horses I owned and had in my life, a little Haflinger gelding named Aeneas of Deer Haven. Aeneas has since passed, after battling numerous health conditions, but his memories and the many things he taught me over the years have remained.
Aeneas came into my life when he was 10 years old. We’d been looking to grow our herd for our farm, which we’d recently purchased, and my initial hope with Aeneas had been that he would be able to fill the role of being one of my main horses for me continue my own horsemanship and riding education. My heart horse of many years, Mocachee, was heading into his senior years and in the near future, I knew I would need to start easing him into a lighter workload. After taking a few test rides with Aeneas, checking out his groundwork skills, and getting a PPE done, I wrote the check and we brought him to our farm. Aeneas was young and well-bred, and when he came home, I was full of hope for the future.
At first, things had seemed to be going well enough. I’d noticed some inconsistencies in his behavior, but there hadn’t been anything significant that had made me feel like those inconsistencies couldn’t be worked through with training, management, and time. A few months into owning Aeneas, however, I came out to the barn to find his eye weeping and swollen shut. I called my vets and when one of them came to do an exam, she found something very concerning. Aeneas was missing part of his third eyelid, which showed evidence of being surgically removed. And there had been no evidence of any surgery in any of his vet records.
The discovery of the third eyelid removal prompted some digging, and eventually, I was able to get my hands on Aeneas’ missing medical records that the seller had skillfully hidden. Aeneas had a slew of issues in his medical history, including Insulin Resistance and squamous cell carcinoma. The scaring on his face, it turned out, was actually from an improperly applied chemotherapy drug (the veterinary team who did his surgery years later would express to me that they were amazed he would let anyone touch his face at all). At first, I’d been determined that with the right management, good vet care, and the right training, we could get him stable enough for me to still be able to achieve my dreams and goals with him. So I got to work.
I threw myself into making plans, except those plans never really worked out like I’d hoped. For roughly a year, I tried, and tried, and tried to get Aeneas stable, but it was one issue and roadblock after another. Aeneas was chronically inconsistent in training (something that, over time, I began to notice was pretty closely tied to his chronic pain), and we were constantly battling lameness issues, skin issues & skin infections, and reoccurring issues with his eyes. It was two steps forward and ten steps back, and seemingly no end to that cycle.
As I neared the one year mark of owning Aeneas, I had to sit down and make myself look at the reality of what was truly going on. Aeneas was constantly struggling, and there were some real, difficult to manage, physiological reasons for it. Constant training and ridden work only seemed to be making things worse, not better. How fair was it to push him into the role of being one of my main horses? At the end of the day, I determined that I wasn’t okay with having my wants and dreams trumping my horse’s well-being.
And so, I made the really hard, really not fun choice of stepping back from those dreams with Aeneas. Instead of being one of my main horses, Aeneas became my husband’s horse (which my husband, who had fallen in love with Aeneas right off the bat, was 100% on board with). When Aeneas was well enough and sound enough, he and my husband enjoyed light pleasure riding, hand walks through the woods, groundwork and liberty work, and, at times, Aeneas would do the occasional light lesson or participate in a low stress “teaching assistant job” during one of the many clinics and classes we held at our farm. When he was struggling, focusing on getting his pain managed and his body stable was a much better route than pushing him to perform no matter what. In some ways, the blow of that hard decision was softened by having another horse on the farm, Mercutio (whose story I’ll share at another time), who unexpectedly stepped into the role Aeneas had stepped out of, but that letting go still wasn’t easy.
A few years into owning him, Aeneas had an eye removal surgery at the North Carolina State University Equine Clinic. As we’d known going into it, in Aeneas’ particular case, the surgery wasn’t going to be a magical fix for all of his issues, but it did buy him a few more years where his pain could be better managed. Eventually, Aeneas did retire from riding and lesson/clinic life, as his pain and soundness were growing harder and harder to manage, and there did one day come a point where we had to say goodbye and free him from his pain.
I’m currently in the middle of wrapping up the last of my self-edits/revisions on Heart of Hope before I send it off for its first professional edit next month, and the female lead of the story, Isabel, goes through a similar struggle with a talented and well-bred young horse. And ultimately, just like I did, she has to take a step back and be willing to set aside her dreams in order to do what her horse needs. I hope that journey will be one that resonates with readers and fellow horse lovers. My time with Aeneas wasn’t always easy, and there were some days it was extremely hard, but I’m still grateful to have had Aeneas in my life, and to have been in a position where I could give him what he needed, even if it wasn’t what I’d first dreamed of.
Heart of Hope is scheduled to release this fall on November 25th. You can pre-order the eBook now exclusively at my online bookstore (pre-orders will be coming to retailers later this summer). If you haven’t started the Hooves & Hearts series, you can get yourself a copy of the prequel novella, By Heart & By Soul, by clicking here.
Photos by Serenity Oasis Farm, Tom Crockett Photography, and Rachel Sheets Photography