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Life's Adventures

In my last post I mentioned how characters in my novels are gleaned from real life. If you've read my author biography, you may see that Whim, Jamus' horse, is based upon the first horse I ever owned Russell R.

Russell was a very intelligent boy with an amazing sense of humor. More than once he played pranks just for the fun of it. Once, he even hid behind the barn when one of my friends arrived to see me. He'd taken to charging the fence at her because he seemed to love seeing her scream and run away from my "killer horse."  (He was actually one of the kindest and most gentle horses I've ever known but he liked to put on fierce faces to make people think he was a tough guy.) That day, she asked me where he was and I told her he was somewhere in the back. Now, I had seen him peek around the corner, see her and then duck back, but I kept his secret. Only when she was leaning on the top rail talking to me did he charge out from this hiding place, teeth bared, right at her. She screamed and bolted back.  I swear he stopped in his tracks and just started laughing at her.

Whim's devotion to Jamus and his mischievous personality are all based on Russell.

Where am I going with this?  Somewhere, probably in the last novel, there may well be an equine episode based on my adventure this morning. I headed out to feed my three horses, only to find no horses to feed. Someone--more than likely Chance, my more "creative" horse--had knocked down the rails on the back section of fence and all three boys had gone adventuring.

Luckily, there is woods behind my house and it would have taken a lot of extra navigation for the horses to get out to the road, so I wasn't as worried as I normally would have been. Still, I hiked out for over an hour looking for them. After a pretty good woodland search, I get in my truck and headed out to drive around the farm field next door. I caught up with the escapees not too far from the trail back home.

Adventures like this are more sources of inspiration for stories and plot elements.  Somewhere, this experience will nestle in my brain.  Sooner or later, it will probably spark an idea for a story of its own or an episode in a novel.

Just is case you see it in one of my books, you can say you saw it here first!