walking horatio
Thursday, 18 June 2020–
dogs,
fiction,
novel,
Ragstone Hollow Press,
Walking Horatio
One morning towards the end of September, my cousin Leo
appeared at my door and handed over a brown heap of fur that had a tail at one
end, a wet nose at the other, and a tongue that stuck out and quivered like a
rubber carpet in an earthquake.
I wrote that sentence a long time ago. I thought they were
the first words in a short story. But for some reason the character of Horatio
the dog and “I”, the unnamed narrator of the piece, didn’t want to say goodbye
to me. Or for that matter, me to them. I wrote what I thought was going to be
the second tale of a trilogy, and that when I finished the third tale that
would be the end of things. A neat little triptych of left-of-field short
stories. Cool. I could put them in a collection some time in the future.
Except the third story, which would have rounded things off,
never happened.
Whenever I sat down to write it, other things happened
instead. And they kept happening – between other projects and amidst the
general trauma of life – a chapter at a time, over the course of maybe fifteen
years. Until what I had was a book, sort of by surprise.
Of course, nothing is ever that simple, but it’s as close to
the truth as I can explain it. There were rewrites, and trimming, and editing,
and all the rest, naturally. It didn’t just spontaneously appear as a coherent
narrative, perfectly set out and written (hell, nothing’s ever perfectly
written, and over the course of such a long writing period there were many
tricky things to deal with), but it felt like something of a gift all the same.
Almost without realising it was happening, there was a book full of Horatio,
and I’m very pleased about that.
We meet “I” and Horatio in the book, and they have
adventures and lazy days, and the sun rises and the sun sets, and there are
bones to be consumed and books to be read, and walks, plenty of walks, to be
taken, and friendships and life to enjoy, or if you can’t enjoy it then to at
least accept it and be okay about things, as much as you can be.
I think it’s a pretty decent book. But then maybe I would do. I'm pleased with it.
It's my hope that you'll give it a go,
and that if you do then you like it too.
The book is currently available in paperback only, and
stretches to just shy of 300 pages. Fingers crossed, an ebook edition will appear
in the future.
Here are some links.
