At least ten years ago, Rob wrote a young adult novel called 7th Born. It’s set in a fictional South Florida town, Westfield, an equestrian community fashioned after Wellington, where we live, the polo capital of the world.
The protagonist, Marlina, 16, is the seventh born of a seventh born psychic and her talents are starting to manifest themselves. Because Rob wrote the novel under his own name and the protagonist was a female teenager, the novel’s rejections tended to focus on the fact that he was a guy and how could he possibly know what a teenage girl felt and thought?
That critique is somewhat specious. Men often write from a female perspective. One of the most famous examples of this is Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. And women often write from a male perspective – take J.K. Rowling and Harry Potter. It’s not about the gender of the character so much as it is the writer’s grasp of the character’s heart and soul, what he or she feels.
At any rate, 7th Born has found a home at Crossroad Press, where we now have many of our backlist titles and some of our original books, like Aliens in the Backyard and The Synchronicity Highway. The other day, Rob and I were talking about this novel, which has always been one of my personal favorites.
He decided to write David Wilson and his partner in the business, David Dodd, to find out where the book was in the formatting stage. It turned out that David Dodd, who does the formatting and the spectacular illustrations for the book (while holding down a full-time job elsewhere) already had formatted it – for Kindle, the Apple store, the Nook – and sent Rob a copy. That in itself was a synchro since the book was sent to Crossroad weeks ago and we’d forgotten about it until we started talking about it.
Rob wanted a copy so he could give it to an expert in the equestrian field who could check it for accuracy. He was particularly interested in accuracy about the nerve agent a corrupt vet uses on the horses that renders them useless as competitors; about the competitions generally; and about horses. Even though we’ve lived here for 14 years, have attended polo matches and competitions and our daughter rides, we don’t know much about horses, per se.
So once Rob got the formatted e-book, he sent it to our housemate, Cassie, for her iPad. She has worked in the business for more than twenty years and has traveled all over Europe with her various employers and their horses. Cassie’s employers have all been uber wealthy, the clear one percent. They have to be in order to own million dollar horses, to ship them from one country to another for competitions, to pay for grooms, trainers, managers, and oh yes, those vet bills.
Cassie read the book in a couple of evenings – amazing, since she works 12 hours a day. On the night she reached the last few chapters she came running into my office.
“Trish, when did Rob write this book?”
“I don’t know. Maybe a decade ago. Why?”
“Can I read you something?”
“Sure.”
“It’s a synchro.” And she read me a passage in 7th Born where the ferrier has left for the horse season and moved back to the Biltmore estate in Asheville, North Carolina. Cassie paused and peered at me over the rim of her glasses. “It blew me away. In April, I’m headed for the Biltmore.”
Cassie, like the fictional ferrier Rob wrote about ten years ago, works for the Vanderbilts, and their home out of season is the Biltmore estate in Asheville. Cassie, like the ferrier, will be living on the 8,000 acres of the estate with her two border collies and her horse.
Who could make this stuff up?
How strange. This does seem to happen with books, often they foretell a future event and with this example it’s personal to you. Maybe it’s something that happens through the concentration of the actual writing process.
Sounds like a bit of foretelling came into play in the writing of the book!
Yes, it sure does!
Very cool story, Trish. I look forward to reading 7th Born when it’s republished, sounds like the universe thinks the timing is right.
It does sound like the timing is good!