A local author's latest work is galloping up the sales chart on Amazon.

Lee McLean's second book is titled Love and Rules, Life Lessons Learned with Horses".

"The older I get the more I realize that everything in horsemanship is just like in life, so there are certain things, truisms that seem to keep popping up and after a few years I got thinking there's almost a book in this and sure enough there was," McLean says.

She says horses, like people, just want the simple things.

"They're sentient beings, we've got this feeling that horses are magical and mystical because they do so much work with horses now, helping people heal, but the more I've gotten to deal with them and be with them I think horses are so much like ourselves, they want to be safe, they don't want to be hungry, they want trusted friendship, community and they want to add something positive to the world," she says. "They want to be encouraged; they want to make their little chunk of the world a better place".

She explains horses have a lot to teach us, from accepting things that we can't change, learning about fear because there are times, we should be worried about what we're getting ourselves into, sometimes it's getting into a situation we're not ready for or sometimes we're just living inside our own heads too much instead of our hearts.

"Horses are always surprising me because sometimes I'm so caught up in what I'm doing day-to-day that I don't actually pay attention to see what they have to say. They have opinions, they do tell us things by their expressions and their movements and what they do with their ears and their noses and their eyes and it's sort of up to us to assimilate the information they put out and sometimes we drop the ball and we don't see it, that too is a lesson we learn from horses, we have to pay attention, we have to get beyond ourselves."

She says the first book, Horse Woman, came out of her habit of sitting down and writing out each day's experience over the last 50 years of riding, every horse, every show, every lesson and training session.

That was turned into a book with her publishing company, Red Barn Books, north of Calgary.

McLean wants to support small independent booksellers that have taken a nasty hit over the last couple of years because of the pandemic and suggests buying the book from them and if they don't have it, she'll make sure to get it to them as quickly as possible.

She writes and posts online every day on Facebook at Keystone Equine which, she says, has gotten a great following all over the world.