This year, for the first time in nearly 40 years, I didn’t have a book published. For most of the last two years, I have been distracted and preoccupied by writing on the blog about the New York Carriage Horses and other things on my blog, which has evolved into the centerpiece of my writing life.

But I am still a book author at heart, even that that means something quite different today than it did even 10 years ago, and today I finished Talking To Animals, my next book, and sent it off to my agent, who will read it and then, if he likes it, sent it off to Simon & Schuster, my new publisher.

If they like it, and I can finish any revisions in a reasonable time, then it will be published next year, probably in the Fall.

If felt really good to send the manuscript off, I got a lovely letter from Rosemary Ahern, my free-lance editor. She is a great gift to me. “I probably say this every time,” she wrote me (she doesn’t), but this is now my favorite of your books. Reading through the final version yesterday, I was so plealsed and moved by the way all the stories and ideas come together. I’m very excited.”

Being an author, the first thing I thought was “well, that’s nice, but she’s probably just saying that to be polite.” Then I thought about it and remembered that Rosemary is not capable of guile or insincerity. I think she really likes it. I hope my agent and the publisher likes it as well.

Publishing has changed, fewer bookstores, fewer book reviewers.  I love working on my blog, but there is a special magic still about writing a book and seeing it published. I miss book readings and book tours, I hope I will have both next year. Finishing it – at least the first draft of it – has taken a load off of me.

The book is late because I spent most of the last two years writing about the New York Carriage Horses and researching their story. The book is paid work, and that will be helpful.

I also love the subject. The book looks back on my many years of learning how to communicate with animals, it also calls for a wiser and more mystical understanding of animals that we seem to have in our world right now. The carriage horses informed much of the book and helped me focus my ideas about the future of animals in our world.

I go back to the first dog in my life – Lucky – and then through my other dogs, a Swiss Steer (and a beef cow), barn cats, chickens, goats, roosters, sheep, donkeys and ponies. Each one taught me something about talking to animal and listening to them. If we can do this, we won’t have to argue about how the carriage horses feel, we actually see how they feel. They can tell us.

If you can’t understand them or communicate with animal, you can’t make intelligent decisions about their future,  you can’t save them in our every day world. I also write about my sad conclusion that the animal rights movement has squandered it’s moral right to speak for the animals in our world. There is a hateful and cruel streak to the movement that has damaged its credibility, threatened its future and clouded the future of animals, once in our every lives. Animals like the horses are being driven to the margins, to slaughter to extinction. To save them, we must keep them in our everyday lives.

I’m excited about the book, I think it turned out to be more helpful and prescient than I would have imagined. So the author has risen again, and he is excited. Stand by and wish me luck, I will share in the process. it felt so good to write this book, and to send it along.

Publishing has changed radically since I left Random House a few years ago, I’m not sure quite what to expect. I will find out soon enough and pass along the news.