The Blue Horse (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781518871283)

Jill Hand grew up in a little town on the New Jersey Shore where time moved at a more leisurely pace than it did elsewhere. She distinctly remembers a man who came around in the summers selling vegetables from a wagon drawn by a horse that wore a straw hat, and an Italian knife-grinder who went from door to door, singing opera and peddling a bicycle that pulled a little cart with a grindstone on the back. She drinks a lot of coffee, black, no sugar. Jill is keenly interested in history, especially the little things that don't usually make it into the historical accounts. As a case in point, she once read the diary of one of her ancestors who operated an artillery piece during some of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War. He was at the Battle of Gettysburg, but he didn't have much to say about it. Instead, he went on and on about some apple pie that a farmer gave him during a lull in the fighting. Those are the details that Jill likes to put into her stories; not how the battle turned out, but how good a piece of apple pie tasted to a gangly nineteen-year-old from rural New Jersey, who went off to war because his brothers and cousins were going and it seemed like the thing to do. Jill is a graduate of the College of New Jersey, with a degree in elementary education and minors in Spanish and psychology. Her psychology studies convinced her that everybody is a little bit crazy in one way or another. A former newspaper reporter and editor, Jill now writes speculative fiction. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications, including Another Realm, Aphelion, Bewildering Stories, Jersey Devil Press, Suspense, and Weird NJ. The Blue Horse is Jill's first novella. It's about employees of a twenty-fourth-century business that specializes in time travel and their quest for a remarkable animal that actually existed. She wholeheartedly believes that time travel will be possible someday and that, like television and the Internet, it will eventually be used primarily for entertainment purposes.