childrens books

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Edgrr is Coming!

My new book, “Edgrr the Bear Who Wanted to be Real”, is coming!

Edgrr was originally published in 1987, a year after my first children’s book, “Teddies to the Rescue” was published. “Sara” came out the following year. After that horses demanded more and more of my time. I was already teaching and training. There wasn’t time for everything so the bears found their way, as so many bears do, to a back corner of my life. They weren’t forgotten or set aside. They simply had to wait for their turn to come again.

Bears can be very patient, much more patient it seems than the many horses who were demanding that I pay attention TO THEM. Never mind all those silly children’s books They wanted me to write something IMPORTANT about them.

So I did. I began with “Clicker Training for your Horse” followed by “The Click That Teaches: A Step By Step Guide in Pictures” and “The Click That Teaches: Riding with the Clicker”. That was just for starters. I don’t know how tens of thousands of emails and internet posts I have written. Then there were the DVDs, the conference presentations, the on-line courses, and the Equiosity podcast. In 2023 I published my newest horse book: “Modern Horse Training.”

I’ve written a lot of words that have gotten a lot of attention. I’m not alone in speaking out on behalf of horses. Horses today have a much louder voice. They are being listened to by people all around the planet.

It’s amazing what happens when people start to listen. Horses begin to feel less pushy. They can relax – a little – and let others have some attention.

In my case that means I get to invite you to

“Teddies To The Rescue” was first. The new edition came out in August of 2023.
“Edgrr” will be published on February 1 2024.

You can order both books through my web site: theclickercenter.com

Or you can get them through Amazon. You can order Edgrr on Amazon after Feb 1 2024.

Read them to the little ones in your life. Read them to your horses. Horses like it when you share time together. Or simply read it for your own enjoyment while you remember the magic from your own childhood.

I’ll share more tomorrow.

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It’s Time For A New Book

It’s time for a new book. I’m not talking about another book about clicker training. My new book, Edgrr – The Bear Who Wanted to Be Real is the second in the series of Kenyon Bear Books. Edgrr is the perfect winter time story.

Edgrr does not want to be a teddy bear. He wants to be a real bear.

All the other bears at the Shuttle Hill Herb Shop find good homes. But not Edgrr. Nobody wants a fierce bear.

Edgrr the Bear Who Wanted to be Real will be published Feb 1, 2024. I’ll share more tomorrow.

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Why Now?

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!

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Everyone Should Have A Hobby

Everyone should have a hobby. If you are thinking mine has something to do with horses, you would be partially right. I do spend most of my time working with horses, writing about horses, talking about horses, thinking about horses, living with horses. But I do have a hobby that only partially revolves around horses. I write children’s book.

C.S. Lewis wrote: “When I was young, I read children’s books in secret. When I was an adult, I read them openly and with pleasure.”

C.S. Lewis is of course the author of the Narnia books, so I am in good company. If you are not familiar with his children’s books, you have a treat in store for you.

When I was three years old, my parents read “The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe” to me for the first time. JRR Tolkein’s “The Hobbit” was read to me when I was four.

My much read, much loved copy

These books had a powerful influence on my life. Just the fact that I remember listening to these stories when I was so very young shows you the impact that they had.

When I talk about horse training, I say that all training methods are made up of three layers. There is the underlying belief system, the guiding principles and the methods we chose. When I describe the core ethical belief system that guides my training, I say to people: “I read ‘Black Beauty‘ when I was little, and I cried when Ginger died.” When it comes to horses, I am unashamedly sentimental.

I would have been six or seven when I encountered ‘Black Beauty’ for the first time. So before there was Ginger, there was Narnia.

Nowadays everyone knows about Middle Earth, but when I encountered C.S. Lewis and JRR Tolkien, that was years before they were widely known in the US. Every fall my parents would get the children’s catalog from Blackwells Bookstore in Oxford England.

In October we would spend days pouring over the catalog and choose the books we wanted for Christmas. In December a carton would arrive from Blackwells containing the books we had selected.

Ordering from Blackwells meant we had many books years before they were widely known in the US. It’s hard to imagine it now, but growing up, I was the only person in my class who knew about hobbits.

My favorite books were filled with magic. I wanted books that would take me to Narnia and Middle Earth. Of course, I loved the Paddington books and was charmed by Winnie the Pooh. There was also ‘Green Smoke‘, and ‘The Children of Green Knowe‘, to name just a few of my favorites.

There were never enough of these books to satisfy so I starting writing my own. I write the kind of stories I would have enjoyed reading as a child. The magic is real, the animals have voices, and fauns and dragons do exist.

Why am I writing about this? You know me as a horse trainer, and the author of the clicker training books. That’s been my focus for thirty plus years. I want horse-friendly, kind, caring, compassionate training to become the norm in the horse world.

The path that put me on an interception course with clicker training began when I was three years old and I found my way to Narnia for the first time. The children’s books that I most loved have very much shaped the person I am today. They taught me important values. I read ‘Black Beauty‘ when I was little and I cried when Ginger died.

The path that children books put me on led to the writing of “Clicker Training for your Horse” and my other books on clicker training.

These training books have had a major impact in the horse world. They provide an alternative to the force-based, “show them you’re the boss” training that is so prevalent throughout the horse world. People all around the planet are now using clicker training. They are recognizing that you don’t have to “hit harder” to get horses to listen to you. In fact, when you stop hitting them, they listen to you so much more.

I’ve been listening to my horses, and they are telling me it is time to share the children’s books I have written. They are filled with love and loyalty. Those are important lessons to learn to carry forward into a life filled with horses.

I hope you are curious and you want to know more. I am going to make you wait until tomorrow to unwrap my new book!

Coming tomorrow: More Details!