the road to walking horatio

It came about by chance, and as a surprise to me. This was never going to be a novel. I thought I was writing a short story. Heck, I was writing a short story. And I finished the short story too, as all good writers should . . .

Except . . .

Except it turned out that the characters in the story hadn’t quite finished with me. As I was writing other things - science fiction, fantasy, horror, crime, a little bit of slipstream and mainstream and yes, if I’m being honest, some chick-lit too -  it was as if something in my head was glancing around in search of someone.

Turned out the someone was Horatio the three-legged, Polo Mint-eating dog, along with the characters he and his temporary owner had met on the estate below the moor.

Okay, I thought. Clearly there’s more to be written here. So I sat down to write what I thought was going to be a second short story. But that didn’t turn out to be the story I thought I was going to be writing at all. It was another chapter in Horatio’s life entirely. Well, that’s interesting, I thought.

At this time, my own life wasn’t going particularly well. I was ill, and in a long-distance relationship that I was trying to find a way of making work, and my parents were getting on in years and failing, and in truth needed looking after more than I did. My writing was also less hit and more miss than I would have liked at his time too - sure, I’d sold stories around the world to a few good markets, neat Indy press anthologies, Alfred Hitchock’s Mystery Magazine, Australia’s oldest and best-loved science fiction publication, as well as appearing in the odd mainstream journal now and again, and I’d had a couple of Westerns published under a pen-name too. But none of this felt like success ought to. I didn’t seem to be getting anywhere, not really. I was having a lot of near-misses with agents and publishers, and I’d more unpublished novels and stories than published ones under my belt. With all the other pressures on me, I thought I might have to stop writing.

But these odd moments in Horatio’s life kept presenting themselves to me, and, in the scant few hours I had to myself, I kept writing them up.

They became, as my dad was slowly drowning in the terrible waters of dementia and while my mum died of bowel cancer, a sort of lifeline for me. A way to cling onto something for myself, while I pushed myself to the edge of endurance and cared for my parents and, finally, bid them goodbye.

So what I’d thought was going to be one story turned into two. And then what I thought was going to be a trilogy of short stories about Horatio the dog turned into four. And that seemed too regular a number of tales to tell about a three-legged dog. So I had to write a fifth story. And then a sixth came along, because well, you know, so-and-so meant such-and-such was happening. And then . . .

And then I realised I had something of a mosaic novel forming, and that there was a through-narrative between what I’d previously thought were individual snapshots of what was going on. There was a storytelling line through the tales and also, as the air of stoicism and the laid back attitude started to form, a beginning, middle, and an end.

So I stuck at it, rewriting and rearranging things, and got there. To the end. I thought.

But even endings aren’t always endings, it turned out.

Just when I thought I’d be finished with the book, and was about to say goodbye to it and all involved within its pages, on perhaps a bit of a downer ending - something that seemed appropriate given my mood and the deaths around me - my head kept looking for Horatio and his pals. And found them.

The ending I thought I’d just about arrived at wasn’t the ending.

A somewhat more fantastical, uplifting finish to the book came, as more chapters told themselves to me, and I realised the theme of flying and in particular elevation (in its psychological form as much as a literal descriptive term) was going to bring about something quite different, and appropriately uplifting.

And I’m glad of that.

Walking Horatio is a book about stoicism, of accepting what you can’t change, and of finding beauty there in whatever circumstances you land in. It was somewhere for me to go to when the real world was too awful to contemplate, and allowed me to keep writing when it would have been easier to sink into depression and despair.

The prose style I’d adopted for the first tale I’d told, which was, with considerable rewriting, to become the first chapter, intrigued me too, and I found myself doing all I could to work on it, bringing in, I hope, a measure of charm to a cut-back style. I didn’t have the time or the energy to produce the typically big fantasy books I’d been writing, so the writing came to reflect the less-is-more aspect of the tales and what they were trying to convey. I was writing as concisely as I could, making the spaces between sentences work as part of the telling, to allow myself the freedom of white space. After all, if there weren’t any white spaces in a tale, all would be darkness.

I wanted this to be light, for the prose to be invisible, reflecting Dashiel Hammet’s contention that “the best style is the style you don’t see.”

And if you don’t see it, and it just looks effortless . . . well, that’s the art, isn’t it. That’s when you know you’ve got it right.   

 

 

and the dance goes on

 

So flash fiction. It’s tricky to write, and sometimes feels more like an exercise than it does a free-flowing act of creation. But it’s handy to learn the discipline, to make good with what you can of its length, and not much of that there is. Most of it is 1000 words or fewer. 

 

I’ve written maybe a couple of handfuls in my time, for better or worse. (Usually worse, let’s be honest.) And I should probably write more of them.  “In the White of the Snow,” for instance, is a 1000-word spin on the Snow White fairytale, which was published by Daily Science Fiction some time ago. My even shorter piece, “Near-Death Experience,” appeared once in the small press magazine Fusing Horizons and then was reprinted - at a different though still sub-1000 word length - in a free newspaper available to pick up in supermarkets across Yorkshire. So despite the paucity of words available to you, it gets you read, and that should never be taken for granted.

 

Which brings me around to this:I have a new flash fiction piece in print, written just the other month. It’s already been sent out to subscribers of the Flame Tree Press Publishers’ newsletter. And just the other day the newsletter appeared live on their website. Meaning you can, if you are so inclined, read it there yourselves, free and gratis.

 

It’s a short horror story, and it’s called “And the Dance Goes on.” And you can read it by clicking here.

 

I hope you give it a go. I hope you enjoy it. And I hope you write a few flash pieces yourself.

more words make more tales . . . make for short story sales

 

It’s been a while since I’ve updated this blog with the news that I have a new short story out. It’s partly for want of not trying to get anything in print, and it’s partly for trying and failing to get anything in print. If you’ve read the last blog post here, then you’ll know my physical and mental resources have been deployed elsewhere for quite a while. I hadn’t really written any new fiction for quite a while. And after my dad died, I didn’t feel much of an urge to either.

 

But slowly something began to come back to me, a scribbled piece of flash fiction here, and attempt at a longer effort there. I tried to finish a short story I’d begun before my parents got to the stage where they needed my care, and it ballooned and (at last glance) was up to 57,000 words and no end in sight. Or even the suggestion of an ending. Or where it might lead to get to that ending.

 

I wanted to finish something.

 

So last November, I think it was, I tried my luck at writing short fiction that wasn’t flash fiction again. And came out with a couple of stories a week for a month. They poured out of me, as if they’d been waiting all that time for me to unplug the dam.

 

Well, fair enough. It was a relief to write them. But were they any good? I’d no real confidence in myself to judge them any more. Assuming I’d ever had any skill in judging my own stuff. I sent them off to a couple of friends, who assured me I wasn’t running around with the back of my trousers torn off, showing my nether regions to any who had the misfortune to look up on them.

 

So I subbed a few of the tales, to see what would happen.

 

And got some good news pretty quickly. Two of the tales were accepted for print by Flame Tree Press, a company that makes really handsome books and publishes the novels of Ramsey Campbell, a writer I’ve been reading since I was about twelve years old. And it quickly got better when I saw the contents of one of the collections I’m to be included in - part of their Gothic Fantasy range, a book called WERE-WOLF. My story “When Sleeping Wolves Lie” is going to appear in a book containing one of the great man’s tales. That alone makes me smile and think I’ve done enough to satisfy myself for quite a while.

 

The other tale I have in a Flame Tree book, incidentally, is a piece focusing on the Norse Trickster God, Loki, and will be in their forthcoming LOKI anthology, as part of their Myths, Gods & Immortals range.

I’ll let you know when the books come out. Forgive me, but a boy has to plug his wares now and again.

 

I’ve another couple of pieces that have been taken this year as well, but as the publishers haven’t announced them as yet it’s probably for the best if I employ a measure of caution and don‘t say what they are just yet. But when I can, I’ll be sure to mention them.It’s nice to be back writing. 

 

It’s nice to know I can, sort of, do this again.

 

. . . and so

 

And the seasons pass, and all is change. Because that’s the way it is with seasons, with the movement of time, with the turning of the Earth, with the ageing of our bodies and the tiring of our minds also if it comes to it . . . however much we wish it were not so.

 

It’s been a while, I know. And a lot of life has happened, for me, for you, for everyone really, since I last made an entry here. And as we all know, along with life there’s life’s dark companion, the big old bad we tend not to talk about, because we are all, to one degree or another, in denial of it. Such a crude thing, a hard terminology, is death, but that’s what it is and unlikely to change, no matter how much everything else changes. Death’s the constant. And there’s been a lot of it, too, in my days, since last we spoke. More so than life, it’s been death that’s kept this blog quiet for as long as it has been . . . along with the hardships of lives coming to their end.

 

Time.

 

Passing.

 

So my parents died, and being my parents, they did it in what felt like the hardest way imaginable. The uncomfortable disfiguration of a severe, slow-crawling cancer in my mum’s case. A cancer that turned an already small, narrowly-built woman into someone who looked like a famine victim in her final years, and then began to eat into her face so that even she didn’t recognise herself when she looked in a mirror. There was pain with it too, and tiredness, the like of which most of us won’t be able to imagine. And the cruellest of death’s thieves took my dad, vascular dementia. And being dementia, it took him again and again and again each day and every day, sometimes hour by hour, a new horror striking him as he slipped further away in the wilderness of mirrors where our consciousness, where we ourselves stand, or think we stand, a hologram of Id and Ego and all the rest. It’s the place where we are as real as we believe ourselves to be, and where we lose ourselves, ghostly vapour fogging the silver of the mirror, where tarnish rusts our memories.

 

It was a hard time, looking after them, and though I had passing help, the majority of the care-giving came from me. My mum went first, her spirit finally broken as she saw her husband slipping away, his memory all but broken. But I saw him through to the hospice with her at the end, and that brave man who’d been the ogre of my childhood and then the hero of my adult life was present enough to hold her hand and find the will to say goodbye, to be there as the rise and fall of his sleeping wife’s chest came to its end and her breath went, deflating and there no more. After which it was mostly just me, looking after dad, and trying to help him cling onto who he was. I barely saw my partner through these times, much as I love her and so wished she were with me, and for the year when the pandemic was at its worst, and while that scarecrowed egotist Boris Johnson’s bring-your-own-bottle parties were being held each weekend at Downing Street, I sat with my dad as the world sweated a fever of love, loss, denial, and greedy self interest. Alone in ways I hadn’t really believed it was possible to be alone before, run ragged beyond exhaustion at the twenty-four hour a day care my dad needed. I don’t think I’ve ever known a despair so profound, nor a night so long and desperate as many of the nights I knew then.

 

In the end, his passing was every bit as hard as my mum’s had been. He forgot how to eat and drink, and so away he went, starving and dehydrating, burning up in the bed my brother and I put up for him in his living room at home. Was he there at the very end, did enough of him surface to know we were there, his two sons? We spoke to him and perhaps a flicker of something stirred. And then, toward the end of a long hard afternoon, as my brother came back into the room and said he was there too, with me, my dad let go his grip on life and went, leaving a grimacing death mask of the pain he’d been in. There, and then not.

Just a week or two before he died, my dad - all but monosyllabic and  communicating through gesture as much as anything else - surfaced enough to speak. How he did it, I don’t know. But the man I’d known for so long was there enough to say the words to me he’d never expressed so openly before: “It’s important that you understand I love you.”

 

A day later, when he’d sunk back down under the dementia, he was fighting me and trying to kill me. As I say, like my mum, being not a person to do things the easy way, the fight - on his part, I was just stopping him hurting himself - spilled onto the street and the police arrived . . . But we got him calmed down, with the help of a visit to the hospital, which sort of shocked him back to calm - and not very much longer after that his final days were upon him.

 

I do wonder if he was himself at the very end, before he finally let go, upon hearing my brother’s voice. I’d find it hard to believe if not for that earlier rising he made, when he said words I’d never heard from him but knew anyway. My partner’s dad made the point that because it’s impossible to know, I get to choose. Choose whether my dad came back for his final moments before going or not. And I should choose to believe he was there, I really should. It would make life easier, to think he was restored – that the vital part of him was there – but somehow I find it very hard to do that, however much I want to believe it. But I’ll try and remember that, through the sadness and all the rest.

 

There’s so much more I could say here, but I won’t. There have been other losses, painful and cruel in their own ways - my Uncle Ken, a character you couldn’t put into fiction because no one would believe in him, my Uncle Arthur, a different character but equally as incredible, and even Jess the cat, inherited when my mum and then my dad died. All gone. All having left, in one way or another, their mark.

 

And so there’s this, the here and now, which is to say the aftermath of all of this. I’m a changed man, both physically (hell, carrying your dad up the stairs each night to bed as he is fighting you takes it out of you) and mentally (I still leap out of bed if I’m sleeping and a car horn sounds - luckily, I don’t live in a city - thinking it’s the pressure mat sounding its horn, and telling me my dad was out of bed and needing help). I’ve probably got PTSD from it all, is the truth of the matter. 

 

But I’m learning to deal with it. Such as it is.

 

A change of season. 

 

Bringing us all a little closer to winter.