Mara Dabrishus's Blog, page 8

So it begins…

Yesterday, American Pharoah won the Kentucky Derby. He got a good trip, ran a bit wide on the turn, and had to hope Firing Line wouldn’t find a second wind a few breaths from the wire. Winning wasn’t easy. It never is in the Kentucky Derby, with horses everywhere and plans dashed the second you leave the starting gate.

But that happened. That’s done. We’ve got other things to think about.

The second he crossed the wire, thoughts shifted from “can he win a real fight?” with comparisons to the...

On Tearing Things Apart

I’m working on editing my second book, Finding Daylight, which began life as a beast of a first draft. 89,000 words is not an easy figure to look at, especially when you take into account the sheer amount of rewriting that will occur between the first round of edits and the end. I don’t even want it to be 89,000 words, which means that I need to cut, and cut without flinching.

After about a month of restructuring and deleting whole sections of Finding Daylight without a care in the world as t...

Review: Summer Circuit

Summer Circuit
by Kim Ablon Whitney

One of the many things I love about Kim Ablon Whitney, besides her first horse novel The Perfect Distance, is her horse knowledge. She showed on the A circuit, and now she’s a USEF judge, so those horse facts you want equestrian fiction to always get right? Kim Ablon Whitney always delivers.

Summer Circuit is about Hannah Waer, a privileged girl in her last summer before college. She’s riding the summer circuit, a prestigious and intense seven-week horse sh...

Print has landed. (Plus, enter to win!)

After weeks and weeks of OCD fiddling, the paperback copy of Stay the Distance is on the shelves. The proofs are beautiful! Additionally, you can win a copy at Goodreads by signing up here. Run don’t walk! The giveaway ends on the last day of April.

Creating a Cover

Covers fascinate me, so I thought I would share the story of how Stay the Distance received its own shiny cover. I had always intended it to be a DIY project. The image was one of my own, pulled from thousands taken at Saratoga Springs during the last racing meet.

Before

Here’s the cover as the original photo. It was taken too early in the morning at the Oklahoma training track, where dozens of horses were jogging and breezing while I aimed a DSLR at them and sucked down a huge cup of black...

Review: Turning on a Dime

Turning on a Dime
by Maggie Dana

Samantha and Caroline are destined to become fast friends, with their mutual love of horses and spunky attitude. Unfortunately they live in different centuries. Caroline is a privileged Southern belle in the midst of the Civil War, and Samantha is a biracial Olympian in training. How on earth do these two meet? A pesky, supernatural dime. Before Samantha knows what’s hit her, she’s waking up in Caroline’s room in 1863 and thrust into the chaos of Union troops...

Review: Appaloosa Summer

Appaloosa Summer
by Tudor Robins

This is one of those books that just makes you happy after you read it. The story is quiet, one of pushing past loss and finding that life keeps going after traumatic events that shake your foundations.

Meg, our main character, is recovering from the loss of her horse, Major, who dies underneath her at a major show. She decides that the best way to accomplish this is to squirrel away in the family cottage for the summer, working for a B&B and getting as far fr...

New Blog!

Sometimes you just have to go with what you know, right? I’m starting up a new blog with a fresh look that will hopefully get me more motivated to chatter about life and writing. There’s so much of that going around! For now, time to finish up some reviews…