I wrote a book, and I like it!

For over 35 years I've been procrastinating about writing books - there are many unfinished ones on the computer. I wrote a lot of articles for horse magazines, I even wrote for Horse Talk TV (and did some on-camera reporting - you can find me doing the 8 minute report on the Heavy Horse Field Days and talking to people about their products), I wrote my fingers off for my Masters degree (not literally), but I was always going to finish one of the books soon.

Then a few months ago I realised that if I didn't finish them, edit, re-edit and edit them again, all these beautiful people and horses who exist in the stories will die with me. They deserve the chance to live on through words, and as long live words, so do words give life to them (sorry, Shakespeare). So I picked one at random - the first in my series of Outback Riders - and just finished it. It's only 95 pages in print (36,000 words) so not a massive tome, just a light read about kids and their horses in the outback of Australia. I know kids (I was one myself, once, I have three of my own and I teach them at high school), I know the outback (lived there for 7 years and my hubby was born and raised there) and I know horses (grew up on a horse stud, competed at endurance, pony club, dressage, jumping, eventing, polocrosse, hacking, have lots of national and state champions/titles) - so, combining the three seemed fairly sensible to me.

Is it going to be make a lot of money? Doubt it, but it's well written (remember - I have a Masters in Education, I should be able to string together some sentences) and the kids I tried it on, my 'guinea pigs' at school, all loved it (and, no, they weren't brown nosing in order to get good grades, they genuinely liked it and even the slower readers couldn't put it down once they got in to the exciting chapters) and they are telling me to hurry up and write the second one in the series... so almost as nice as having the book done is the fact that these kids are pestering me to finish the second one and send it to them for research purposes.

I learned how to get it on Kindle, and I hope to convince some of my traditional print-on-paper book reading friends to download the free Kindle app to their iPhones, computers or iPads so they can read the e-book version, but most are hanging out for the printed copies to arrive (in a couple of weeks). And I think I may be procrastinating again by sitting here blogging... time to get back writing the next Outback Riders book. The one I've just done is called Horses Of The Sun and the next one will be Horses Of The Light (there are good reasons for the names). I hope I can get all these wonderful horses and people who live in my head down into books over the next few years so that they can live on forever.