B.E. Jackson Interview Published on: 09, Dec 2024

To be sure, having a wild horse to tame and saddle train at age ten was challenging and ultimately extremely rewarding, but I can’t say I did it all alone. While I was my mare’s principle handler and rider, I was supported by a community of horse people whose wisdom, suggestions, and solutions helped keep me safe. I also had access to some wonderful mentors, including my father, who told me, “Bonnie, nobody counts you out but yourself.” I took that to mean that I had the final say on whether and when to move on from a project. As I got older, I would apply this to anything difficult I was taking on in life, that I wasn’t absolutely required to do. In essence, once I have set a goal—self-publishing my first novel, for instance—I am the one who I answer to. Forming such an alliance with my own adventurous spirit was the first step in my creative process.

Later in life, when I chose the acting field, my first agent added to my awareness with this dose of reality: “There are always going to naysayers—people who won’t like you or your work no matter how hard you try. Some of them will make decisions on whether to hire you. Learn to accept that and don’t let it take up space in your head. Move on to the next opportunity.”

Although I didn’t receive the diagnosis until I became an adult, I have almost classic symptoms of attention deficit disorder, or ADD. Thus my early academic life suffered from my scattered, distracted thinking. Rather than being hyperactive, I was a daydreamer and embroiled myself in stories, dramas, and other mental vacations that served to torpedo my grade point average. Some of my best “creative” thinking occurred in my math and science classes. I remember during a Chemistry class in high school, one of my classmates passed me a note that simply read, “Where ARE you?”

When I was taking writing courses in college, the subject of pre-outlining always filled me with dread. The way I felt most comfortable writing was to sit down and write as the story unfolded in my head. Then I would put it aside for a time—possibly as short as an afternoon if the deadline was looming—after which I would pick it up and begin revising until I was happy with the outcome. This was fine for short stories, but not so much when I began thinking about long form writing.

When our son was eight, we decided to leave Los Angeles, where I was an actress and my musician husband had opened a recording studio, and move to Arizona. At the time, we both were thinking of the safety and benefits for our son of moving out of a large city and into a smaller community. Although it had dawned on us that this would probably mean a career change for one or both of us, I don’t think the reality set in for a few blissful months. Over the next year, my husband was able to commute to L.A. for work, while I got involved with the local theater scene in the nearby town of Prescott. For extra income, I did temp work at a variety of businesses, just as I’d done in L.A. One day, I saw an ad in the local paper for a horse magazine editor/writer. “Must know horses, be proficient in Mac, and submit a writing sample.” Well, I had never taken a single class in journalism, but I had won an award from a horse product company for writing a harrowing account of how their leg wraps had saved my horse’s life when he was caught on barbed wire next to a train track with the train whistle blowing in the distance. I was hired based on my submission and spent the next three years writing and editing for The Western Horse magazine. When a better-paying job as managing editor at a different horse magazine came along, I signed on and that is how I came to spend nearly a decade editing my own and other people’s words.

With horses, I practice a style of training and development called “natural horsemanship.” Using these techniques, I’ve raised and trained a half-dozen foals over the last twenty years. A standout would have to be Twinkle, the filly I saved from slaughter after she was born on a huge PMU farm in Saskatchewan, Canada. At the time, I’d just started editing my second horse magazine and we were covering the story of how the female hormone replacement drug Premarin—a composite of the words “pregnant mare’s urine” or PMU—was actually produced from impregnated horses, whose urine was collected throughout the course of their pregnancy. There was little use for the “byproduct” foals of these mares so shortly after they were weaned the farmers “chowed” them out to the local meat packer. I joined a rescue group that adopted and placed four hundred foals the first year and six hundred in the next two. And of course, one of the babies came to live at my ranch.

At five months old, the filly’s only human contact had been when she was chased into a cattle hauler with twenty other foals and transported some two thousand miles. When I first stepped into her corral, I literally couldn’t get within five feet of her, as every time I did she would race off to the farthest corner. So I stopped trying. Instead, I got a chair and a novel I’d just started reading and spent the morning sitting in her corral and ignoring her. The first day, she tiptoed around to stand and stare at me from different corners. By the end of that day, she’d come near to sniff at me, then quickly dance away. The next day, I set her breakfast hay down next to my chair. Then I busied myself mucking her corral. By the third day, she was cautiously eating her meal next to me, sidling away every time I tried to reach out to her. On day four, we had a breakthrough—I not only touched her shoulder, I was able to give her a little scratch there which she seemed to like. From there, we began to see where she was itchy and by the end of the week, she was seeking me out for my itch scratching abilities. Within another week, I had put a halter on her and was walking her around the ranch. Within three years, she was saddle trained and we were traveling to competitions around the Southwest.

Sadly, I lost her too soon. One night in her fourteenth year, another horse in my herd chased Twinkle through a fence and she fell down a hill, fracturing her shoulder. We didn’t know the extent of the injury for a week, during which time she and I were inseparable. Once, when I was brushing her coat as she ate dinner in the early evening, we heard a coyote howling just on the other side of the pasture. Twinkle shot me a look of such fear, both of us aware she’d be incapable of fleeing from this predator. When I finally assessed the severity of her injury, I made the dreaded call to the vet—not for the first or last time with my animals—and stood beside her stroking her neck while the drugs took effect and she eased down to the ground. She is buried in my pasture, just a short walk from the corral where our friendship first began.

I think the three careers that have affected my novel writing the most were developing my emotional range during my training and work as an actor, working for a brief time in the early 2000s as a case manager for a behavioral health clinic, and my decade as a magazine editor. I’ve been told that my novel, Tiger Cate feels visceral to readers, that they can feel what she’s feeling and empathize with her journey. I really think that is my actor’s imagination fully fleshing out the scenes and making emotional connections to what’s at stake.

My acting definitely shaped the storyteller I am today, but I’ve always been imaginative. Early on I made up tales to get out of doing things I didn’t want to do, like going to school. I’m from a family of storytellers. Those who weren’t writing plays or novels were composing music and songs or producing artwork. My Danish grandfather Christian taught ballet and tap. My Latvian grandmother Franciska was a fine artist who managed to keep her family fed on the income from the coconuts she painted when the family first arrived in Orlando, Florida.. In this way, her creative abilities enabled her husband to open the dance studio that still exists today. Looking at these role models makes me strive to leave my own legacy of the stories that inhabit my mind.

The adjustment to the needs of the job and then setting a routine or habit of working that is both effective and stress reducing. I was lucky enough to work from home for both my publishing jobs, which helped me fit the ranch work around the computer work. Also, each career I entered had a different interpersonal requirement—from the people I interacted with as a creative performer to those I managed as an editor. One of the greatest adjustments was my case management job, as I had never worked in the behavioral health field before. Relating with people diagnosed in the DSM-VI as “seriously mentally ill” was a little daunting at first. Curiously enough, I think my horse training served me well in helping me modulate my energy and body language.

I think I’ve covered how my training as an actor helped me to communicate empathetically through my characters and their struggles. When I was first starting in fiction, one of the best pieces of advice that numerous sources gave was that a story needs stakes, that something must be at risk. This has helped me create a tone that I think compels the reader to continue on, to want to see how it’s going to play out.

My takeaways from reading some great novels in my genre are the need for foreshadowing and for redemption or closure. By the latter, I don’t mean a happy ending but rather one that makes sense to the reader, given the experience I’ve put them through. In my earlier drafts of Tiger Cate, the betas kept asking for more on a certain character’s arc or telling me that I should tie up this or that loose end. So, the editor in me got to work on the overarching aspects of the story and characters. When I finished, it felt satisfying to have provided readers with more fleshed-out character and story arcs.

How the body language that you use when interacting with animals can also work on humans, lol. When I’m teaching my horsemanship students about holding the attention of their horse through body language, I actually draw on the examples of power positions that social psychologist Amy Cuddy demonstrated in her TED talk. Animals don’t understand much of the language that comes out of our mouths, but if you have a good command of your body and are aware of the energy you’re send them through movement, you can communicate your ideas and requests in relative silence. For a brief time, I assisted in some equine-assisted psychotherapy sessions where the clients were told to move the horses around the corral without touching them or using sounds. The results were a revelation for them.

I usually start with a setting or situation and then I play “what if.” What if a struggling artist was living in her camper truck amid the homeless in Los Angeles? First, how would she survive? Then, what would happen if she got drawn back to her rural ranching roots by two cryptic texts? What if she found out that everything she’d believed about her family her whole life had been false? Answering the questions made me imagine a fighter, someone who was scrappy but also still emotionally connected to the people she’d left behind. Sometimes, the secondary characters I create are based on interesting people I’ve encountered in my various careers. I have no doubt, though, that my protagonists and I share a lot of similar traits.

Once in a while a character will first appear to me in a dream. In my novel, Tiger Cate, the character of Levi Saaga came to me about halfway through writing my first draft. I woke up early one morning and said out loud, “She has a guy, a love interest. He’s American Samoan, ex-military, and built like a linebacker.” That doesn’t happen very often. It was truly a gift from my muse.

Another source of characters, especially my antagonists, are people I’ve had conflicts with, mostly in work situations. I joke with my friends that they better be careful how they treat me or they might end up in one of my novels. I don’t think I’ll go into further detail about that.

I think the moment I had really achieved something as a novelist came when I sent an early draft to a developmental editor and she came back with glowing praise. I believe her exact words were, “I can’t believe this is your first novel, it’s structured so well.” That was eighteen months after I’d written the first draft and then immediately pitched it to agents. As you might imagine, I received unanimous rejections from all. As I revised the subsequent drafts, I started learning more about independent publishing, wondering if I could really pull off being my own publisher. Thanks to the many services that help indies in their journey, plus the great feedback I got from beta readers and editors, I do think I beat the odds in getting my novel published.

In my personal life, I think my long-term marriage to a fellow creative speaks well for us. Shortly after we tied the knot, I found out that at our wedding reception my slightly tipsy mom had walked around saying she gave our marriage six months. Besides feeling shocked and infuriated, I vowed to set a new goal—to beat her prediction and then some. By the time my mother died, my husband and I had been together twenty-eight years.

To be honest, I still “pants” the first draft of any writing. This is because my particular muse likes the freedom to go where the story takes her. She then defers to my need for organization and we revise with an emphasis on finding the structure that will support the story to its completion (and yes, I do discuss such things with my muse.)

When I wrote my first long form book, a non-fiction chronicle of my journey with horses titled Herdmates to Heartmates: The Art of Bonding with a New Horse, I tried to ease into its structure by writing down ten questions, whose answers became chapter topics for in my book. I’ve also incorporated the Save the Cat Writes a Novel beat sheet and K.M. Weiland’s book, Structuring Your Novel into my process. These have helped me to develop a style where I “reverse engineer” my outline after the first draft.

That’s such a good question. It made me want to look up the word to get the full list of meanings. In a general sense, imagination is any process that involves mental imagery, so really, the act of living is rife with imagination. I like to keep my mental imagery stimulated with fresh input, so whenever I’m down at my stable doing maintenance I have an audiobook playing in my ear buds. I don’t have the same luxury to sit and read many print books these days, but I’ve more than made up for it with audio versions. Aside from books in my genre, I particularly like books and podcasts on the craft of writing. However, when I’m first drafting something, I purposely stay off the ear buds and let the muse speak to me as I muck stalls or sort tack. I have writer friends who say they do the same thing with housework, so it must be that doing a daily physical task or activity that doesn’t require concentration, even walking the dog or running, can stimulate the imagination. Now that I’m thinking about it, I used to learn lines as an actor by recording the words and listening to them while I took a walk or drove someplace. The meanings and emotional truths of a scene would appear to me while I was involved in an unrelated activity.

I like to read and write in the domestic suspense/thriller genre and family dysfunction is my theme of choice. My favorite novels to read are twisty and sometimes shocking, such as Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl and Sharp Objects and Ruth Ware’s In A Dark, Dark Wood and The Turn of the Key. I’m simply fascinated by human behavior, which is why I chose to get a degree in psychology rather than creative writing. (Although I’m now rethinking that, as taking college writing courses offers a writer valuable deadlines and great feedback.) In my trilogy, Tiger Cate, I deal with family estrangement and the effect of childhood trauma on the adult psyche. As I flesh out my series, I use the writing prompt, “Just when she thinks nothing bad could ever happen to her again. . .”

I came across the website last summer and was intrigued by the chance to feature Tiger Cate’s book cover, which I’ve been told is quite good. To be honest, the book-writing world is rife with what I’ve heard people jokingly call “picks and shovels,” referring to the gold rush days. So my criteria for joining a group or site is whether it will supply me with the kind of “pick” or “shovel” I’m currently lacking. I love that AllAuthor offers a fairly easy to navigate process for getting more exposure for my published work. This allows me more time to focus on what can’t be farmed out—the creation of the stories and characters that will fill my future novels.