Conversation with Author Lori Windows, a champion endurance rider who wrote the novel "Simiakia"

I was very happy to have Lori Windows on the Keepin It Real w/ Caramel Podcast. Lori Windows is a very interesting person to speak with. I really enjoyed our conversation. Actually, I had a wonderful conversation with Lori Windows. We spoke about riding horses, which I know, I will need Lori for help if I rode one of her horses. Lori Windows grew up enamored of the writings of Grey, Brand, Terhune, London, Burroughs, and Farley. Her father set her on a horse when she was two years old, and she has now ridden horses on six continents. In 1982, she discovered the sport of distance racing. She and her variety of horses and mules have amassed multiple national titles and more than 63,000 sanctioned race miles. Lori decided to write a novel called "Simiakia." Simikia, the first novel by champion endurance rider Lori Windows, now available from Endless Sky Books, is a modern western (set in the 1980s in Idaho) that combines a deep love and understanding of horses (specifically Appaloosas) with adventure, Native American identity, the search for pride in oneself and one’s heritage, and a touch of romance. Raised without hope or pride in his heritage to what promises to be a short life of crime, alcohol, and drugs, Nez Perce teenager Al George gets an unexpected second chance. A heist gone wrong ends up with him working on probation at the very Idaho ranch he and his “friends” tried to rob, owned by Celia Bolt, who left her own rich-but-dysfunctional family to move West many years ago, and the taciturn Morgan Kyles, who has his own checkered past. Over the course of the summer of 1986, Celia and Morgan work out the thorny details of their relationship, while Al regains his pride and his sense of self as he works with the ranch’s signature Appaloosas, finds love—and finally, through a deep bond with one very special horse, reconnects with his Nez Perce heritage and discovers the truth of his strange, recurring dreams of an Indian brave on a very special horse, striving to protect his people from the soldiers pursuing th