Why now? Why have I finally decided to share “my hobby” with you? Let me answer that by telling you a story. In the fall of 2020 we had a severe windstorm in my area and a tree fell on my house.

There’s a longer version to the tree story, but I’ll leave that for another time. The tree crashed through the roof and created considerable damage to the rooms underneath.

During the clean up, while I was sorting through papers, I came across a story my mother had written. It had probably been ten or fifteen years since I had looked at it. She wrote it when she was in her twenties. It was the start of children’s book about Charles Alexander and an upstairs armadillo. I have always known about Charles Alexander. He was something of a good-natured poltergeist (if such a thing exists) who was part of my mother’s childhood.

The story was only a couple of pages, just long enough to introduce the upstairs armadillo. It was started but never finished. The upstairs armadillo was waiting for me to tell his story.

I have learned that when a horse or a character wants you to tell their story, you stop what you are doing and write it down. So that’s what I did. Over the winter of 2021, I wrote “The Upstairs Armadillo”. The book wrote itself very fast. I so enjoyed the process, that I wrote a second Upstairs Armadillo book, and I was starting on a third when the weather warmed up. The horses and spring chores were back to demanding more of my time, so book three of the Upstairs Armadillo series was set aside.

I was expecting to get back to it over the winter of 2022, but I was asked by a mass market publisher to write a clicker training book for them. That took precedence. I signed a contract and in March of 2022 I began writing that book. I submitted the manuscript at the end of May, and then I heard nothing. The editor I was working with stopped responding to my emails. Finally, in July I was informed that the editor was no longer with the company, and they would not be publishing my book after all. I have no idea what happened, but I was actually relieved. It had felt a bit like selling my soul to work with this company, and now I was free to manage the book myself.

That book is “Modern Horse Training, A Constructional Guide to Becoming Your Horse’s Best Friend”. I published it on April 26, 2023.

During the year that I worked on it, I never forgot about the Upstairs Armadillo or the other children’s books I have written over the years. I pulled them out of the various drawers in which they were stashed and began reading. And that’s when I decided it was time to share them.

You’re going to have to wait for the Upstairs Armadillo. I’m going to begin with the Kenyon Bear Books.

I published these books in the late 1980s and then horses took over and for many years the children’s books sat very much on the back burner.

Tomorrow I’ll share the story about how the Kenyon Bear books came to be written.

I hope you are excited by my news and you’re eager to order the new book, but I am going to make you wait just a little bit longer to find out how you can get your copy.

Coming tomorrow: More Details!