Moondance and Hwin

I like the new Collectors’ Club Special Run Moondance, a lot. But if I’m getting another Forever Saige this year, it’s going to be the Regular Run Hwin instead.

Looking back at my most recent permanent acquisitions, there are very few spotted horses in the mix. The last ones were the Vintage Club Stablemate Riptide and the Chesapeake Stablemate Cecil, and both of those were “Gift with Purchase” kinds of items. The last intentionally purchased ones were the BreyerFest Bozeman and the Classic Duchess. I guess I’m just on a solid color kick right now!

Some models look better in solid colors anyway, and I think the Forever Saige is one of them. I’m not the only one; quite a few hobbyist hearts seemed to turn when they saw her as last year’s BreyerFest Special Namib in that beautiful Dark Bay-Brown.

The real Hwin, as I suspect most of you know, is named after one of the talking horses in C.S. Lewis’s The Horse and His Boy.

I have mixed feelings about that installment in the Narnia series. I loved the Narnia books in general, and I was really excited to find out that there was one with talking horses in it.

Reading it did motivate me enough to start writing my first novel – about a talking horse – back when most of my friends were writing Star Wars fanfic. (My early exposure/obsession with Mr. Ed didn’t hurt, either.)

But that was because it turned out to be my least favorite book in the series. I don’t know if it was because it hadn’t aged well, or if it had to do with the apprehensions I had about equine literature even then. I felt compelled to write the talking horse fantasy novel I really wanted to read.

Around the same time, though, I also discovered the hobby, and after a while it mitigated my need to write horse fiction. Why write talking horse fantasies when I could essentially “live” them in miniature form?

I still continued to write fiction, but horses were only incidental to the plot, if they appeared at all. Even my fiction-writing attempts today are relatively horse-free. The hobby still fills that niche for  me.