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 I was having a lot of near-misses with agents and publishers, and I’d more unpublished novels and stories than published ones under my belt.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.