The Great Horse – Media Kit

John Allen Royce is a horseman from Texas with an education in accounting and information technology — and a talent for writing. Mr. Royce graduated from the University of Texas/Austin (BBA, Accounting) and passed the CPA in 1994, embarking on a career in finance and IT implementation.

Inspiration for the author’s writing came while working in Boston, MA, where commercialization was displacing the venerable used bookstores around Harvard Square in the late 1990′s. This regrettable loss of history combined with his knowledge of horses to spark the award-winning adventure told in The Legend of the Great Horse trilogy.

Background

Inability to type started this author on the road to writing. By mid-semester Mr. Royce was still too slow to appear on his high school typing class’s progress chart, which began at 40 words-per-minute. The teacher banished him to the school library instead of redoing the chart. There, the remainder of the school term was spent among yellowing books filled with lithograph images. Love of research and respect for history grew out of those quiet hours serving “detention.”

Mr. Royce was introduced to horsemanship at a young age, and developed a passion that led from Western riding to competing in Combined Training (Eventing) and Junior Jumpers. He formed the first-ever Equestrian Club at the University of Texas to provide affordable instruction to students, and after graduation worked for the industry-leading Stadium Jumping, Inc. during its promotion of the 1989 World Cup of Show Jumping in Tampa. Mr. Royce managed his own facility, Kendalwood, a hunter/jumper stables in Houston, before embarking on a career in accounting and systems implementation

Inspiration for Writing

Inspiration for his time-travel trilogy, The Legend of the Great Horse came in historic Boston, Massachusetts. ‘Gentrification’ was displacing the hallowed old bookstores around Harvard Square in the late 1990’s: an irreplaceable trove of historical knowledge lay quietly in the doomed abundance of those sleepy bookstores — over a century of professors’ libraries and classroom texts — perhaps to be forgotten if not retold and remembered.

The idea came to Mr. Royce about a story, an entertaining journey through accurately-rendered history. If only a common link could be found between ages of mankind, perhaps something hidden within the colorful pages filled with horses from different cultures and times…