It was good work, the kind of work that let you sleep soundly at night and, when you awoke, look forward to the day.

In my opinion, trying to guess what readers want is the wrong approach. You have to tell your story as best you can and as true to yourself as possible. You have to be honest and fair and vulnerable and foolish and brave, and not care what anyone thinks of it.

Once you'd resolved to go, there was nothing to it at all.

Life there was hard and it made people hard.

Things usually work out in the end." "What if they don't?" "That just means you haven't come to the end yet.

Horses were never wrong. They always did what they did for a reason, and it was up to you to figure it out.

I became known as Lily Casey, the mustang-breaking, poker-playing, horse-race-winning schoolmarm of Coconino County, and it wasn't half bad to be in place where no one had a problem with a woman having a moniker like that.