By Susan Friedland
Portraits by Kacy Brown
Kacy Brown Photography
Ocala, Florida’s Equestrian Photographer
Natalie Keller Reinert claims she has always been a horse girl. The fiction author from Florida, who has written dozens of books set in the Ocala horse world—with two series now in pre-production for an Amazon Prime series—remembers vividly the first horse she obsessed over: a trick pony who could count.
“I remember going to the Land of Little Horses in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, a miniature horse theme park, when I was around 4, and I remember a horse that could count. They would ask a math question and he’d tap the answer. That might have been my first love affair. I was very obsessed with the counting pony,” Natalie said. Like a good novel, Natalie’s journey from penning horse stories for fun in childhood to creating an equestrian fiction empire brims with conflict, plot twists and a satisfying resolution.
Natalie and her husband, Cory, live in North Central Florida with two chestnut geldings in their backyard. “Both of the boys are rescues. The big chestnut is a pony, and the little chestnut is a horse—one is a Quarter Horse and one is a mini. My senior mini was a late gelding, and he’s very rambunctious and in control—his name is Manny. My middle-aged horse is my dressage project and his name is Ben,” she said.
Reading, Writing and Riding
As a girl, Natalie surrounded herself with My Little Ponies and Breyer model horses. “I never had human dolls. The only human doll friend I was interested in was Megan, the girl from My Little Pony,” she said. She read voraciously, wrote horse stories for fun and eventually made her way to riding.
“I wrote my first chapter book, about a racehorse, in second grade. This was followed up by several sequels. I have notebooks and notebooks still of sequels to ‘Black Beauty’ based on the Pullein-Thompson sisters’ Black Beauty’s Family series. I checked them out in fourth grade and thought, This is a summer project. So I wrote about racehorses and show jumpers related to Black Beauty.”
Around the same time Natalie wrote her first racehorse and show-jumper stories, she began to ride. “I don’t come from an equestrian background—just a regular suburban background. My mom had the desire to be horsey, but not the opportunity.” Natalie took riding lessons in Cocoa, Florida, at a hunter show barn when she was 10. She dragged the whole family into the equestrian sphere, and the next year she got her first horse—a chestnut Quarter Horse hunter named Smuckers.
At 13, Natalie started her first of many working-student jobs and fell for her first off-the-track Thoroughbred. “His name was Amarillo. He was a claiming horse who was abandoned and ended up with a cowboy in south Florida, who kindly sold him to us,” Natalie said. “I had Amarillo throughout my childhood and into adulthood, and we evented. He was the literally best horse, and he’s the horse I still have dreams about.”
When Natalie found eventing, she was hooked. “Eventing has the most joy and partnership with the horse. When you see horses on cross-country, that’s a partnership that couldn’t be achieved without patience and time,” she said. The patience and time that make an eventing pair soar are the same ingredients required for anyone seeking a career in writing. Natalie’s chosen discipline would lay a foundation to buoy her future career.
One of Natalie’s early job opportunities outside of a barn turned into a real-life meet-cute. “I was 18, attending a local community college, and I was working to pay for gas to put in my car and take care of my horse. Cory interviewed me for a job at Barnes & Noble and there was something about him from the moment I sat across from him. I knew we were connected in some way,” she said. Natalie landed the job, and she and Cory started dating the following year. The bibliophile couple has been together for over 25 years; they have a 21-year-old son, Calvin, who is away at college studying computer engineering.
Although she always rooted herself in the realms of horses and books, Natalie’s career path has not been a straight shot down centerline—more like a serpentine with twists and turns of unique opportunities. “I had a ‘just say yes’ policy for the first half of my life. I was an excellent travel agent specializing in luxury Disney vacations, I wrote a weekly weather column for an Orlando vacation planning website, and was a concierge at Disney’s Grand Floridian Resort,” Natalie said. Besides those roles, other jobs Natalie held were Walt Disney World calligrapher, marketer for Virgin Atlantic, exercise rider at Aqueduct Racetrack and a mounted officer at New York City’s Parks Department.
To secure the parks department job, Natalie was assessed on her riding skills. The first test was to mount a Clydesdale from the ground. She swung her 5’7” frame up into the saddle and jaunted off through Central Park, riding alongside and under the scrutiny of her interviewer. Natalie passed the skills test with flying colors. The can-do spirit and tenacity shown in mounting a towering draft horse from the ground fuels Natalie’s writing success today. But it was a long, slow path forward.
Author Ambition
In 2009, Natalie had a small breeding farm in Florida with a few horses but had been out of the saddle for a while. When she found out about a free Thoroughbred available in Ocala, she brought him home and started blogging about retraining him. Through her Retired Racehorse blog, she began fostering relationships with readers and created a Facebook community based on off-the-track Thoroughbred support. She also began connecting with the social media world of horse racing fans. These were her first readers.
Two years later, after having lost the farm to foreclosure in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Natalie and family moved to New York where she galloped horses at Aqueduct. During this era, she wrote her first novel, “The Head and Not the Heart.” She researched how to self-publish, poring over articles online, and learned how to format a document for both ebook and paperback. Natalie said, “I used GIMP and a photo from my Blackberry to create my first cover!”
Natalie describes her debut title as “a nervous breakdown in a book about being overwhelmed by the needs of horses and demands of equestrian life. With horses, you lose control over your life and you don’t know what’s next. We all have big feelings—horses give us big feelings—and we keep coming back for more. We love these animals and they take all our money and all our time, and they die for dumb reasons—you can’t explain it to anyone else.”
“The Head and Not the Heart” resonated with readers, and its sales provided financial breathing room for the family. Having one book published also boosted Natalie’s confidence to freelance for magazines and write more books. “It was a big feeling of, ‘Finally!’ I published my first book and I could go on to publish many books because I wanted this for my career. I didn’t know I’d write equestrian novels—I thought I would write romance and do equestrian stories for fun,” Natalie said.
In 2011, Natalie also wrote the first draft of “Ambition,” the first book in The Eventing Series. Her protagonist, Jules Thornton, is a scrappy 20-something trainer trying to make a name for herself in the eventing world despite a depleted bank account and hurricane-devastated farm. Pete Morrison, a fellow competitor hailing from a long line of equestrians, has romantic interest in Jules—which is not reciprocated. Readers fell for Jules and Pete, inspiring Natalie to write seven more titles in the series and a prequel.
Besides possessing a gift for storytelling, Natalie’s rise has been propelled by her dedicated readers. “My very first book-signing was organized by a longtime blog reader and held at Tampa Bay Downs’ annual fundraiser for their affiliate OTTB non-profit, TROT,” she said. Over the years as Natalie kept writing and creating interconnected series, she attracted new readers and kept longtime fans coming back for more.
In 2014, Natalie began traveling to Equine Affaire and other equestrian trade fairs with Taborton Equine Books, an online bookstore that sells at select in-person events. This experience gave her the chance to sign books, meet readers in person and keep growing her fan base. In March 2022, while at Horse World Expo, Natalie and fellow author Heather Wallace brainstormed the idea of having an equestrian pop culture humor podcast for “weird horse girls.” By June, the duo put out their first episode of “Adulting with Horses” and it was a hit. The irreverent, twice-monthly podcast, with episodes such as “The Care and Feeding of Horse Husbands” and “Bribery, Breeches, Books, and Bridgerton,” has thousands of monthly downloads.
Behind the Scenes
Throughout her writing journey, Natalie has drawn on her real-life horse world experiences to pen memorable and believable scenes and characters. “Jules is all the bad in me—and I will never tell how much percentage of me is bad. Jules is the character where I put all my worst impulses toward people I’d worked for and with. Being young and hungry and broke in the horse world is its own witch’s brew,” she said.
To date, Natalie has published over 30 books, with all but four centered around horses. Of the exceptions, three are romantic comedies and one is a theme park fandom novel. Her “Alex and Alexander” series is set in the world of Thoroughbred racing and, along with her eventing-focused series—including “The Eventing Series,” “Ocala Horse Girls” and “Briar Hill Farm,” among others—are interconnected in what fans have dubbed the “Ocala-verse.”
Natalie’s books had grown such a following that in 2024, Flatiron Books, an imprint of Macmillan, picked up the rights to republish all eight books in The Eventing Series with expanded editions and new scenes. “It gave me the opportunity to work with a talented editor to better bring the characters to life and create a more immersive story. Because I published the first book in 2013 and have written many books since then, I’m a different writer than I was 10 years ago. It was exciting to rewrite the characters. I know them so much better after having known them for so long. We want to provide readers who have already read the series with an enhanced series—very much like a director’s cut,” Natalie said.
Another exciting twist is the development of “The Eventing Series” as a streaming show, with Natalie serving as executive producer. The series is currently in development for Amazon Prime. “It’s being championed by Lauren O’Connor at Amazon Prime—a fellow horse girl who loved The Eventing Series,” Natalie said. “I’m very excited to be working with a fellow horsewoman on this project.”
On a typical writing day, Natalie tries to get up before 9 a.m. “I don’t sleep well, so I don’t make myself get out of bed early. It’s how I deal with insomnia: I don’t stress. I make coffee and sit at my desk and write in a journal for a couple of pages. Usually I write for two hours, then go to the gym for an hour, have lunch, have another cup of coffee and work until about 4 p.m. Then I’ll go outside and ride my horse or work in the garden,” she said. Natalie grows vegetables, wildflowers, butterfly gardens and Florida natives. Cory also works from home, managing the business side of Natalie’s career.
Every evening, Natalie reads for an hour or two and watches old sitcoms. Maeve Binchy and L.M. Montgomery are two of Natalie’s all-time favorite writers. “I like how Maeve Binchy writes about friends and women’s relationships. She gives friendship the same emphasis most people give romantic relationships. I like digging into friendship. And I’ve been reading all of L. M. Montgomery’s books on repeat since I was 10 or 11, and I always get something new on each re-read,” Natalie said.
Natalie attributes the appeal of her horse books to the fact they are relatable and immersive. “Either you know the world and you feel comfortable there, or you’re into the world so completely by the end you think you could run an eventing barn yourself. I also really highlight friendships and women working together, and typically I think we see a lot of women pitted against each other. I think my books put friendship, not romance, on a pedestal,” she said.
Her next book, “The Jump,” filled with a new cast of eventing characters, will launch March 2026. Until then, Natalie will keep on riding and sharing horse stories, continuing the dream that first sparked inside her as a little horse girl who obsessed over a counting pony.
Follow Natalie on Facebook and Instagram @nataliekreinert
Listen to Adulting with Horses at adultingwithhorsespodcast.com
Photos by Kacy Brown, kacybrownphotography.com
