eggs & bacon.

Hitting shelves this week, the much-anticipated historical fiction novel, Talking With Horses, is action packed and emotion provoking with love and human warmth, offset by the violence and warfare of the era. 

Emma Armbrust, an 18-year old horse lover, envisions herself as a fantastical bow-slinging warrior princess in a world of refuge from her real-life autism, which enables her to communicate with her jumping horse Tower. She encounters love, faces adversity, and possesses an enigmatic charm, all while facing the hardship of saving herself from medications to make her “normal,” and winning Grand Prix prize money to bail out the family ranch from bankruptcy. Not to mention, surviving a love triangle with her fantasy lover Zehun, a Lieutenant of Attila the Hun, and real-life troubled youth named Jules, a neighbor who romances her by reading history books to her in the Malibu hills. 

Australian journalist and saddle expert, Colin Dangaard wrote Talking With Horses after considering how the horse had greatly influenced his life, first in the Outback, where he was raised, and later around the world. He started riding so early he cannot remember exactly how old he was. “I seemed to have grown up on a horse,” he says. “The horse has always empowered me, as it does every person who builds a relationship with one.” 

Dangaard explores a proven theory that communication between man and horse relates to the compatibility of electromagnetic fields generated by all living creatures. The horse is 55 million years old, man is just 5 million years old, so he figures, the horse knows a lot more about us than we know about the horse. People with autism have cerebral function that is on an electromagnetic grid sensitive to that generated by the horse. Thus, Emma can “talk” with horses.  

Raised in a dusty cattle town on the rim of the Australian Outback, Dangaard started writing fiction when he was 15 years old. “It was more fun than going to school,” as he recalls. He made his first money selling brumbies (wild horses) to impoverished tobacco farmers.

He worked as a journalist in 25 countries, riding horses in every one of them, and was the first person in 200 years to introduce a new saddle to America - the Australian Stock Saddle. He sailed a 34-ft wood boat from Africa to America, where he became Rupert Murdoch’s first Hollywood Editor, launching the National STAR, and his own TV show.

Talking With Horses can be purchased in paperback, hardback, Nook Book, and Kindle Edition format at www.amazon.com, www.barnesandnoble.com, and on the Australian Stock Saddle Company website, www.aussiesaddle.com.

For more information contact Australian Stock Saddle Company P.O. Box 987, Malibu, CA., 90265, (818) 889-6988 Phone, (818) 889-7271 Fax, tassc@aol.com Email or follow Colin Dangaard on Twitter , Facebook, and Blog.

If you love someone, tell them.  Forget about the rules or fear of looking ridiculous.  What is truly ridiculous is passing up on an opportunity to tell someone that your heart is invested.

The goals, dreams, aspirations, hopes, objectives, desires—that pull us in the forward direction of life, while also pulling us from comfortable.  From longing eyes that wait with hope-filled expression to catch the same dream—the same train that pulls us to the unknown.  The potential disappointment yet hopeful success, lathered in a false sense of confidence if lacking faith and trust in the very core of our innate capabilities.  The most universal language is found in the sad determined cold eyes in need of empathy.  

To-Do List: people watch, reflect, pray, be a difference maker.

The more you learn, the more you realize how ignorant you still are.  The more you know, the more you hurt.  What do you know about freedom?  What do you know about me?  Have you seen the sunrise? I heard it can set you free.  Sometimes life can crumble— Sometimes life might make you stumble.  But you can’t drown in all of your sorrow, because you might be found tomorrow.