My therapist is short and red-haired and always listens to what I have to say and never charges me a penny

It will be easy, they said. It will be fun, they said. You might as well give it a shot.

And so I did; I applied for a sabbatical. It's been 16 years since I've had one, and I've been working at YVC for 25 years. Time for myself. Time to write.

It sounded all well and good except for the promises I made. I had a funny kind of proposal, a two-way proposal. I told the committee that if a miracle happens and I get published right away and have to do readings, then I'll do the glamorous writer thing and travel and read to adoring fans and write in the peace of my hotel room at night. But most likely I won't be published (yet -- hope springs eternal), and if that's the case I'll take the time to finish the next novel and thereby get it done in a couple of years instead of the 12 years it took to finish Entangled Time.

But then, just because I wanted to increase my chances of actually getting a sabbatical, I made a ridiculous proposal. I was going to go on social media. I was going to promote myself. I was going to learn all about marketing my writing!

And now here I am, facing the dragon. I am going to have to share words with the world in some kind of public way because that's what writers do nowadays. No more garrets and talking to friendly rats in the glow of a dying candle.

Normally I would procrastinate. My sabbatical isn't till spring. I have MONTHS before I have to think of this whole "exposing yourself on Facebook" fiasco I set myself up for. But now it looks like I'll also have winter off work, or at least somewhat off, and that means I can theoretically start writing sooner.

And I have Lexi, and this little blog I started to track her progress, and maybe without thinking consciously about it, I have set myself up for how I'm going to meet the terms of my sabbatical. Because, you see, writing and horses are quite similar, and for me they are inextricably intertwined.

Yesterday an old school friend of mine asked me an innocent question. She asked me if Lexi was mine, and when I answered yes, she asked me if I thought having a horse was helpful with recovery from mental health issues. And that opened up Pandora's Box.

See, I grew up in a house of secrets and I turned to horses to survive the weight of those secrets. Horses freed me; they lifted me up, empowered me when I had no power. Writing did the same thing in a different way.

If I were to dissect the elements that have brought me here today, suffice to say I couldn't do it in a quick conversation over tea. It's too complicated and too messy and too much the stuff of dirty laundry. But I'm getting more and more convinced that sometimes we do need to drag the laundry out into the daylight and wash it where everyone can see where the dirt came from. Because when we hide the laundry, when we're silent, we end up being complicit in a world that lets horrors happen. I don't even want to speak about those "hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil" monkeys that shaped so many years of my life. They're responsible for an awful lot of evil in the world today.

So for my sabbatical, for me, I'm going to write on this blog. I'm going to write about monkeys and bastards, about genderfluid chickens and learning to train horses in a new way, about disagreeing with Skinner and yet loving clicker training, about what happens when a human saves a horse with PTSD, and when that same horse saves a human with PTSD.

And maybe I'll answer my friend's question about how horses can make all the difference when it comes to psychological wellness. They do for me, anyway.

In the meantime, meet my therapist: