Hi guys, we have Tia Fielding stopping by with her upcoming release One Step Forward, we have a fantastic guest post and a great excerpt so check out the post and enjoy! <3 ~Pixie~
One Step Forward
Tia Fielding
Sam Becker, a horse whisperer, agrees to take one last job before retiring to his Texas ranch. It’s clear as soon as he meets the Taylor family in Kentucky that he’s in for a challenge. What he doesn’t expect is the way his own wounds reopen. He’s never really dealt with the suicide of his mentally ill wife, and he won’t be able to ignore that hurt forever.
Joshua Taylor and his horse, Calla, were a force to be reckoned with on the eventing circuit until an accident ended their careers. Most of the pain is on the inside, however, and Sam knows those injuries are the slowest to mend. Sam’s unique methods help Calla and, surprisingly, Josh, but he’s still lost without riding. Their feelings for each other come hard and fast, and Josh starts his first steps of recovery, but Sam needs to return to Texas eventually. Even if Josh is able to move past the accident, they’ll still have a long and difficult journey to make before they can be together.
Writing About Depression
by Tia Fielding
There are things in life we know very well. It might be cooking for some, or having certain skin color. Maybe it’s being left-handed or being really good at sports. For others, it’s a disability or an illness. Big or small, those things mold us into the humans we are, just like different events in our lives do. And then the infamous “they” tell you, “write what you know.” So why is that so hard to actually do?
For me, one of those things I know too well is depression. I’ve sort of touched the subject in several of my stories, because I’ve lived with it for so long myself. I’ve blogged about depression, but writing it into a story in a major way like I’ve now done with One Step Forward couldn’t be rushed.
I wrote about the tar pit Joshua is in a long time ago. The metaphor of the tar pit seemed like the best way I had to describe how it felt, what depression does to you. It sucks you in, and sometimes you paddle and it helps you stay afloat a little, sometimes it just sucks you in more and more. The worst part about it often is how people who worry about you and try to get you out of your pit get dragged along right into it.
There are things about depression people who have never experienced it will never, ever understand. It’s just one of those things you don’t know if you haven’t felt it clutch to your skin like it never wants to let go. Depression is fickle. It gives you hope. It becomes a part of you. But the worst thing (at least for me personally) is the fact that it makes you dependent of itself.
That’s right: when you’re depressed for a very long time, it becomes such a part of your existence, it feels like you don’t know who you are without it. When depression is on the lighter end of its spectrum for me, it can easily feel like just melancholy, a subtle darkness around my edges that’s almost comforting in the world where you’re supposed to be happy and smiley—something I’m not as a person.
But like my shrink says, keeping the depression exhausts you. It takes effort to keep the depression going for a long time. This sounds funny, I know, but the more I’ve thought about it, it makes sense to me.
So writing about it has always been somewhat of a therapy form. I know this is something I intimately know and recognize. Part of why I haven’t delved deeper into the subject before One Step Forward is that it’s something I know, something that is mine. It is my experience, and I don’t know what I’ll do if a reader hates the way I’ve portrayed it.
But then again, maybe it’s not so much different from the cooking or the football, or even having a disability. Everyone looks at the world differently and forms their own opinions of it all. I just hope someone gets something positive out of my description of what Joshua (and in many ways Sam, too) is going through.
I hope you enjoy the story!
Excerpt
Prologue
HOW I could feel like this and still live was beyond me.
I avoided mirrors so I wouldn’t have to see myself. Conversations, so I wouldn’t have to hear myself or anyone else, let alone pay attention. I avoided dinnertime so I wouldn’t have to taste anything. My family, so nobody would touch me.
I spent most of my days and nights avoiding something.
Avoidance—noun: the act of avoiding or keeping away from.
I was avoiding life.
My life felt like the tar pits. The harder I paddled, the more I was sucked into the nasty blackness that seemed to pull me under, slowly but surely.
Sometimes I thought about things I was supposed to be doing if I was an average twenty-one-year-old male.
I was supposed to be outside, going to movies, laughing with friends, studying, and being as happy and carefree as possible.
I couldn’t remember the last time I saw a movie. I hated myself for what I had become, and it seemed like nothing could pull me out of this misery until it was too late.
Most days I tried not to think about the fact that I was going to die soon. I was withering away and I knew it. When I turned in my bed, it sometimes hurt because my bones had become so close to my skin. My clothes hung on me. I was fitting into a few T-shirts I had kept from when I was fourteen. It seemed impossible to get my jeans to stay on without a belt—a belt that I had to punch new holes in so I could get it tight enough.
I looked anorexic. Well, not quite there yet, but heading in that direction. I wasn’t, though. I didn’t have an eating disorder. I just didn’t want to eat. It was tiresome. Everything was.
I waited for something to change. Nothing ever did. For what must’ve been more than six months, it had been like this.
I hated myself for being this way, for making everyone worry, but I couldn’t find a way out of my pit of tar. There was no one who could pull me out. No one.
They had tried. All sorts of specialists had come into our house and gone for the first few months. From what Eric told me as I listened, concentrating on staring at the wall, I knew there had been people over to help Calla too. Or try to help her. There had been all sorts of whisperers, and they all thought the mare should be put down.
Surprisingly, I felt cold about Calla. I didn’t know the exact condition she was in, only that she was wild, healthy, and scared out of her mind. That was about it. I didn’t know how she looked now since I hadn’t seen her since the accident.
Which I didn’t want to think about… at all.
Sometimes I got terrible cramps in my legs when my muscles were trying to keep up with my deteriorating body. The injuries I had sustained still hurt occasionally, even though they were healed now. So when I felt the urge to move, I walked—or more like limped—through the forest near our house instead of going to the stables.
Nothing moved me. I felt things fleetingly. I was angry one moment and then frustrated the next. Sometimes I longed. For what, I didn’t know. I felt guilty, emotionless—I felt… nothing.
But the longing was there. I longed for something unknown, something that would make a difference.
Chapter 1: The Way We Were
THIS WOULD be my hardest job ever. I knew that even before I saw the video of what had happened.
The rider was severely injured, and the horse had severe damage to the suspensory ligament in one of her hind legs and other milder injuries in pretty much all her other legs.
I remembered seeing the movie The Horse Whisperer. This was pretty much the same deal, though the accident, horse, and rider were very different. I was no Robert Redford either.
The rider, Joshua Taylor, was twenty-one and one of the best eventing riders in the state, if not the entire Southeast region. In a few years, he might have even been the best in the country. I knew his name well enough to know he would’ve been trying for the Olympics at some point.
The horse, Calla, was a mare, a Thoroughbred-Clydesdale cross. She was eight years old and in her prime, or so Joshua’s parents told me. Since the accident, she had gone from being a docile horse with fiery competitive instincts, to a wild beast that injured herself if kept inside the stable. Calla was only happy outside and never tried to escape the large paddock that housed her now. Nobody had been able to touch her in the two months after she had been given the “mostly all clear” by the vet, and even he hadn’t been able to do anything but observe her.
Right after the accident, one of the mare’s legs had been operated on. She’d received the best care money could buy. Following her surgery, she had been closed in a stall inside her barn for about two months. This stall restricted her mobility throughout the duration of her recovery, as any excess movements would cause even more damage.
It wouldn’t necessarily have been that bad if there hadn’t been complications after the surgery. Mrs. Taylor had told me the basics of a big mishap at the clinic—which she refused to name—I’d have to ask about it later.
It had been about a year, at this point, and I wondered how much of the parents’ struggle to keep the horse alive had to do with their belief that the boy and the horse were connected. It cost money—a lot of money—to do all they’d done. Most people would’ve put the horse down immediately, right there in the field where she’d fallen. But they hadn’t. They were either incredibly stupid or admirable, and I couldn’t tell which, not without taking a look at the situation firsthand.
I hated the gig from the start. I was the horse whisperer in this equation, the one with the ability to connect with the animals, read them, and try to get them back to their natural state. A state that for this mare did not include cowering in the corner of the paddock, waiting for half an hour to go get her food when it was given to her, wanting to be sure nobody would hurt her again.
I had a feeling this wasn’t going to be about the horse alone. Mrs. Taylor’s tone on the phone had made it clear that she was afraid she was going to lose her child. The way she begged me, the way I could hear her fight back her tears…. I couldn’t tell her no. I couldn’t tell her I didn’t do that sort of work anymore.
Everyone else—she’d told me—all other specialists and whisperers she’d contacted, had either shown up and left right after or plain refused. She was at the end of her rope, and so was the horse, and, I assumed, the rider.
I left my little house on the prairie, as my sister calls it, and took the first available flight to the family’s home in Kentucky. During the flight I looked at the video Joshua’s mother had sent me. I’d had just enough time at the airport to download it from the Taylors’ private server to my laptop.
It wasn’t until that moment that I realized just what I was up against.
The video wasn’t meant to be sentimental or a trip down memory lane; I could tell that. It was a portrait of her son, and I could see what she meant, what made her beg for my help.
In the first part of the clip, he looked like he was barely in his teens, maybe even younger. He was riding a massive gelding, maybe a Clydesdale, and kept telling his mother, who was behind the lens, that he was okay, that he was just going to jump a few times. With a turn of the camera, I could see the course he had made for himself. The fences were quite high, and I was already anxious.
I heard a voice behind the camera, possibly belonging to Mr. Taylor. “Marie, he’s wearing his helmet and his safety vest. I’m here if something goes wrong. He needs to learn his limits,” he assured her, and she sighed deeply enough for the camera to dip slightly.
The camera then tilted back to the boy on the large horse. He began to gallop around the ring and approached the first fence, which they flew over easily. The camera shook with what I was sure was relief.
He kept laughing, and the horse looked enthusiastic as well. When he decided to cut a corner, the horse did his best, but he was too large for the move and had to stop. He refused to jump at the last second, and the boy had no chance of staying in the saddle.
The camera dropped as Mrs. Taylor wailed. I wasn’t able see what happened, but the scene of the boy flying over the horse’s neck and then the fence burned into my memory. I heard the sound of running footsteps, and I turned up the volume on my headphones. My body tensed with anxiety from not being able to see what was happening, not being able to see if the he was all right.
“Son, are you all right?” his father asked in the distance.
Marie Taylor was still crying, but then she exhaled loudly. I could hear a tiny bit of laughter in her tone when she picked up the camera again to point it toward Joshua.
He got up, laughing his butt off, and clutched his stomach. The horse was approaching them, and he looked sheepish. I could tell from his body language that he thought he betrayed Joshua’s trust by not jumping.
I relaxed as I heard him speak to the horse. “It’s okay, Mickey—my fault… not yours. You’re a good boy. I was being stupid. Are you okay?”
His father looked over and then walked back to where Mrs. Taylor was with the camera.
In the background I could see Joshua checking the horse thoroughly, although visibly the horse appeared fine.
“I’ll try that once more,” he called out and got back in the saddle.
The next jump was more collected. They flew over a fence that seemed so very high for a horse that size. It looked effortless. Joshua was laughing and the horse seemed happy to do what the rider asked.
About Tia
Tia Fielding is a thirtysomething Scandinavian who is a lover of witty people, words, cats, sarcasm, autumn, and the tiny beautiful things in life. Tia struggles with stubborn muses and depression, but both are things she has learned to live with.
After losing the thread of her writing in her teens, Tia rediscovered the joy of writing stories through fanfiction, which later kick-started her publishing career. Tia is not ashamed of her past of borrowing other people’s characters, but has found creating her own much more satisfying.
Tia identifies as genderqueer, but isn’t strict about pronouns. Why? Because luckily, in her native language there aren’t gender-specific pronouns. Being a reclusive author living with her fur-babies is another fact of life for Tia, among the need to write that seems to be a part of her psyche by now.
In the fall of 2014, Tia took a huge leap for most authors and kicked her coffee habit. Do not fret, though, she switched to tea, so her life isn’t completely lacking caffeine.
In 2013 Tia’s one of Tia’s novels was recognized by the industry’s Rainbow Awards in the Best LGBT Erotic Romance (Bobby Michaels Award) category.
