A Horse and His Girl

Six books in one, coming soon

2011-02-14T03:41:00.000-08:00

What started as a "maybe someday" idea nears completion. The response to the saga of a horse and his girl—the horse being Starlight and the girl, Miranda—surprised me when I began receiving fan letters from girls across the nation. When Miranda and Starlight and the five books that followed received a lot of praise from young readers, I wondered how they'd like to have them all in one volume. I finally decided to try. Condensing to leave out redundancies that were necessary to make each novel stand alone, and tightening the narrative, I'm fitting them all—including illustrations—in one cover.

It's exciting to revisit Miranda's and Starlight's many adventures. My goal is to make the attractive, hard cover book, followed by a paperback, perhaps, available in 2012.

Each book, singly, or all six books packaged in one gift set are available now, of course, in many fine stores and online sites, including www.ravenpublishing.net Each of the six books is also available for downloads at www. smashwords.com and on Amazon's Kindle.

Answering a fan about Miranda and Starlight

2011-02-03T03:56:00.000-08:00

A high-school girl from Ohio e-mailed me to ask questions about her favorite series, The Miranda and Starlight books. Here are my answers:

What a pleasant surprise to get your e-mail. Thank you for thinking of me and for asking such thought provoking questions. I am very glad to know that you liked the Miranda and Starlight series. I think that Starlight Comes Home is my favorite, too. I am currently working on putting all six books, slightly condensed to avoid repetition, in one volume. I'm calling it A Horse and His Girl. I just finished entering and editing the fifth book, and am starting on the sixth. I have also written a few other unrelated novels in the meantime. I've published one, Kyleah's Tree, and have written it's companion novel, Kendall's Storm, but have only published it electronically so far, at a site called www.smashwords.com. All of my books are available there, and all but Kendall's Storm are available at Amazon's Kindle Store. I recently finished a young adult novel about a boy who gets in trouble and has to work in a homeless shelter as punishment. I don't have a title for it yet and don't know when it will be published, but it is one of my favorite books so far.

I hope I can satisfactorily answer all your questions. First, you asked about the inspiration for the series. It was mostly my granddaughter, who was about eight at the time I started writing it. She and her two brothers lived with me and my husband at the time. Jayme was a lot like me in her obsession with horses. When I was little, even though I lived on a ranch and had horses available to ride, I wanted a horse of my own. By the time Jayme came to live with me, I'd sold my horses. She wanted to ride horses every chance she got, but most of all, she wanted a horse of her own. Like Miranda, she believed that living with grandparents instead of her mom, being new and feeling left out in a new school were all problems that wouldn't matter if she only had a horse. My husband and I took Jayme and her brothers skiing almost every weekend. Jayme didn't enjoy it as much as her brothers did. One day on the ski lift, Jayme asked me to tell her a story. I began telling her the story of a girl much like her. She helped me choose the name, Miranda. By the time the day was over, I had told her, chapter by chapter, a whole book. I decided to write it down. Of course, in the process, it came out a little differently from how I told it to her, but that is how Miranda and Starlight came to be. Starlight was fashioned after the horse of my dreams when I was a child. I always wanted a pure black horse, but never owned one. Like any fiction, the author tends to add and adapt some of her own experiences, and there is some of that, but the main inspiration was Jayme, plus a lot of imagination.

Why did I bring Miranda, Chris, and Laurie together? I hadn't really thought about how unusual that seems, given how different they are. You've heard of the saying that opposites attract. They also make a more interesting story. I think the friendship between the three arose naturally from the situations I gave them. There is always a bully, it seems, and often his or her bullying stem from loneliness and wanting to be liked. Chris really liked Miranda, but to get her attention, he tormented her. It was his horse that gained her interest, of course, but once they spent time together, she began to see more to him than his bullying. Laurie? Hmm. I think I got my inspiration for her from my favorite classic novel, Anne of Green Gables. As much as Miranda is like Anne, Laurie is like her best friend, Diana. I love that book, and though I didn't consciously copy it, I do believe that it influenced my creation of a friend for Miranda. The three were thrown together because of being on the outside of the popular cliques in the school.

Why did I decide to have Miranda's Dad come back and stop Adam from marrying Carey? And why did I make Miranda hate Adam so much? Very good questions. The answer lies in the way I write. I develop characters, give them situations, and let them dictate the direction of the story as I do my best to stay true to them. I didn't know in advance that this was how it was going to turn out. Adam was rude to Miranda from the beginning. I wasn't sure why at first. When he told her about her father, it was shown that the way he treated her was just because she reminded him of a friend he'd lost. I could have gone with that, but somehow, Adam kept showing traits that I disliked. He still had not become Miranda's friend. Yet it seemed natural that he would fall for Carey and vice-versa when they met. At that point I could have made Adam a nice guy, but it didn't seem to fit.

In real life, I saw how Jayme resented men who came into her mother's life, as well as into mine, for I was single (divorced) when Jayme first lived with me. Jealousy is natural for a child that age or at least it was for Jayme and thus, Miranda. Perhaps it would have turned out differently if I hadn't introduced Margot, who was inspired by a little girl I met at a book signing. She had an older sister named Miranda and they were both fans of Miranda and Starlight. So I began asking, "what if Miranda had a sister?" With my imagination in overdrive, I decided that she could be Adam's child. The more I developed Adam, the more unlikable he became. He obviously didn't like horses or children the way Miranda did, and that was another reason for her to hate him.

In the beginning of the first book, I introduced Miranda's three wishes—the things most important to her. I wanted to have those wishes come true by the end of the series. I didn't know when I wrote about the news and the letter from Miranda's father at the end of Starlight's Courage, that he would ever be found. I assumed I'd leave him dead, but I didn't close that door. When Adam turned out to be a jerk, I wanted to give Miranda her father back. As I said, I write as characters lead me, not knowing what's going to happen until it does. I write character-driven versus plot driven stories. I've tried outlining, but it doesn't work for me.

As far as advice for you if you want to become a writer—find your own voice and the method of writing that works for you. If writing isn't fun for the writer, it won't be fun for the reader. There are those who write a detailed outline and stick to it throughout their novels and enjoy doing it that way. Many of them are very successful and continue to crank out formula books for the best-seller lists. If that works for you, and you enjoy it, there are classes and information on just how a story should be shaped. There are many other authors—some very successful—who, like me, write as the story unfolds, not knowing where it will lead until it gets there. There are rules we all need to follow to make our stories interesting and marketable. They can be easily learned. I would also advise, that if you are serious at making a living by writing, that you also take classes in business management, for writing is a business to be managed, if it is to succeed.

Read Miranda and Starlight electonically

2010-12-05T05:24:00.000-08:00

Getting an e-reader for Christmas? If you do, be sure to download your favorite books. Each of the six Miranda and Starlight books are now available on your Kindle at Amazon.com and on many other e-readers or your computer. If you go to www.Smashwords.com, where thousands of books are available in several formats, you will find the Miranda and Starlight series and other books ready for download.

At a writing workshop, yesterday, we discussed the pros and cons of e-books. A digital book may never have the exact same feel as a bound volume with pages and ink, but what a convenience to carry your library with you in a small, hand-held device for hours spent in travel or waiting rooms. I'll always treasure taking a book to bed with me and turning the pages eagerly as the story unfolds before I go to sleep at night. That doesn't mean I wouldn't enjoy having a Nook, a Kindle or some other reader in my bag as I travel. Yep, I could be happy with both.

Starlight's Shooting Star

2010-07-29T18:22:00.000-07:00

Now available as an e-book, this fourth book of the Miranda and Starlight series can be downloaded at Smashwords.com.

Starlight's Shooting Star begins with Miranda's first day of sixth grade and a new fresh-out-of-college teacher, Miss Hopper. Miranda doesn't like her much when she gives Miranda detention on the second day of school. Miranda hates anything that keeps her from Starlight! As the teacher slowly lose control of her classroom, parents begin to complain. When Miss Hopper takes the kids on a field trip and loses them inside a cave, the school board takes action.

More excitement is in store for the reader when Queen foals prematurely. Doctor Talbot is able to save the tiny filly's life. Chris and Miranda name her Shooting Star. To Miranda it seems that when a really important wish is made on this Shooting Star, it comes true.

Will her wish to make Starlight all her own ever come true? She is afraid it won't if he wins all the races Mr. Taylor has planned for him. The more he wins, the less say Miranda will have in what happens to him, and the less time she will be able to spend with him.

Mr Taylor hires a jockey and orders Miranda to teach him to win Starlight's acceptance and ride him as she does. Up to now, Starlight has refused to run for other jockeys, bucking them off, when they try to control him. Miranda likes being the only one Starlight will give his all to. She would like to have it stay that way, but what can she do?

Starlight, Star Bright

2010-06-07T10:18:00.000-07:00

Now that Miranda is eleven years old, will she make better choices? We certainly hope so, yet there is something endearing about her impulsive nature that gets her into trouble she must rectify if possible. In this third book (Part three of the forthcoming anthology, A Horse and His Girl) Miranda is given more responsibility—and takes on some of her own, secretly. The black stallion, Starlight, once Mr. Taylor's hope for a bright financial future, and Miranda's first love and soul mate, are at the center of each.

Miranda is proud to be Starlight's favorite. She is very angry and upset when Mr. Taylor hires Adam Barber to prepare Starlight for the track, but glad that he is unsuccessful. If Starlight races and wins, Miranda knows Mr. Taylor will never sell him to her. That's why she must keep her successes with his training and racing a secret.

But Mr. Taylor doesn't give up. He hires the famous horse whisperer, Buck Brannaman, to work with Starlight. By the time Mr. Brannaman finishes, Mr. Taylor has entered him in a race. Will he win? And what will happen if he does or doesn't. Miranda is filled with dread on race day, yet she can't bring herself to stay away.

Many adventures involving Miranda, her friends, all of their horses, a fire, a much more are found within the pages of this third volume of Miranda and Starlight's saga.

Starlight's Courage

2010-04-27T08:21:00.000-07:00

The first three books of the Miranda and Starlight series, are now available as e-books. The writing has been tightened somewhat from the original print editions. With a little more editing, they can then be entered into the anthology, "A Horse and His Girl," which will, if all goes as planned, be ready for publication in 2011. The stories will be shortened in "A Horse and His Girl," only to make it more concise and to remove the redundancies that appear in the 2nd through 6th volume. Some explanation about what happened before was necessary to make each volume a stand-alone novel. Much of that can be eliminated when it's bound in one volume, but every incident, event, and scene of the original saga will be intact, more immediate than ever.

Starlight's Courage, the second of the series, introduced a villian. I mean a real "bad guy" not just the Magnificent Four, Miranda's nemeses in the form of the four girls in her class who treat her and her friends with malice.

The "bad guy" is Martin Hicks who drifts through the little town, looking for work before moving on. Mr. Taylor, desperate for help because of Higgins's disabling injury, hires him to take care of the stabled horses. An instant dislike springs up between the man and Starlight, and the man and Miranda. He doesn't last long at Shady Hills, but he is a vindictive man and an escapee from an institution for the criminally insane. And he has it in for Miranda and Starlight. (You'll have to read Starlight's Courage to see what happened.)

When I revised Starlight's Courage a few years ago, I left a small possibility for his return in another episode. Will there be a number seven to the saga of the horse and his girl? If there is, will Martin Hicks be in it? Ah, that's the question I have yet to answer. I'm waiting for Miranda and Starlight to give me a clue, for my characters, though fictional, lead the story and tell me what they would do, while I just write it down.

Horse and Girl Meet

2010-02-16T05:24:00.000-08:00

Before the fateful day that a ten-year-old girl named Miranda Stevens first laid eyes on the young black stallion, Sir Jet Propelled Cadillac, he was the pampered darling of Shady Hills Ranch. Not yet two years old, his training was about to begin. His speed and stamina were expected to equal or outstrip the records of his aging sire, Cadillac's Last Knight. After Sir Jet wins a few big races, his owner plans, he will be brought back to Shady Hills Ranch to take Knight's place. As a sire, Knight has brought in more money than all of Shady Hills' other race horses put together. Cassius (Cash) Taylor places a great deal of hope in young Sir Jet, whom he has carefully bred for this purpose.

A Horse and His Girl: The Chronicles of Starlight and Miranda* begins with their meeting in the field next to the school playground—a meeting in which Miranda becomes obsessed with this horse that seems to materialize right out of her dreams. When she sees him for the second time and reads the name, Sir Jet Propelled Cadillac, above the door of his stall, she exclaims, "What an ugly name for the prettiest animal on earth," and she dubs him Starlight for the single white star beneath his forelock in an otherwise field of iridescent black. She cannot resist the temptation to slip onto his back from the fence of his paddock. The events that follow change the course of Starlight's future.

Miranda and Starlight was published in 2002 and revised and reprinted again in 2003. It is the first in the series of six books that carry the reader on the roller-coaster ride through the many adventures of this horse and girl. All six books are available singly or in a packaged set at www.ravenpublishing.net and at www.amazon.com.

* An anthology of the six book Miranda and Starlight series is being put together. Its release date will be announced sometime in 2011.