I am a horse girl. Those similarly afflicted know that for every birthday, Christmas, Easter, and visit from the tooth fairy, all I ever wanted was a horse. Fortunately, my daughter was born with the same gene, but she is more skilled than I, and so it happened that she outgrew Delray. Del, now styled, Delray the Wonder Pony, is a 17.1 bay Oldenburg gelding. For those of you won’t don’t speak Horse, he’s tall, dark and handsome. I owe that horse my writing career. Beloved Offspring needed a more skilled mount, I needed something to ride, and so, Del and I—like Lady Eve and Lord Deene—fell into an arranged marriage. We had low expectations of each other, but Del is the honorable sort, so when I showed up at the barn, he put his best hoof forward, much like Lord Deene. Riding is both physical and analytical, also cerebral. To work with your mount, you must listen to him with your body. Your backside must hear his spine, and your hands must hear his mouth. This is hard to explain, but once you’ve had a few rides in this zone, you want to go back there. Some days, I…

I write at a small nineteenth-century desk that I found in a consignment shop called Aunt Teeks. It has a tooled leather top with gold scrolling and two small drawers. The leather is a bit scratched, and the drawers are too small for files, but I love the feel of this desk. When I first saw it in the store, surrounded by larger pieces of furniture from various eras, it called out to me. It had such a nice energy, like something out of a Jane Austen novel. I could see reams of letters being written on that surface in beautiful copperplate handwriting. People in the nineteenth century wrote letters and thank you notes and careful lists of recipes and remedies. They had inkwells and steel pointed pens, blotting paper and wax seals. True, I write on a Mac laptop in bytes and pixels, but I like to think some inspiration seeps through the years and technologies from the old wood to me. In my latest historical ONCE AGAIN A BRIDE the heroine, Charlotte, discovers how greatly furnishings can affect a person when she moves from a comfortable childhood home to the cold, rigid house of her elderly husband. Henry…