Meet Horatio! He’s a character in my novel, All the Little Children. The girl is my daughter and she’s not in the novel, although her wit and wisdom provided some of the best lines spoken by my fictional children.
We met the dog five years ago at a riding stables in Switzerland and hit it off. He’s a sweetheart. And HUGE. This photo doesn’t quite do him justice. He's massive.
Some writers cast famous actors into lead roles, but I only ever cast Horatio. Looking back, I wonder why I gave such an important narrative role to a dog?
Here’s what I think was going on. The main character in All the Little Children is not an easy woman. Marlene Greene is brilliant in many ways – a success story who seems to “have it all” – but we see behind the scenes and behind the eyes. She doesn’t feel like a success.
Loving doesn’t come easily to Marlene. She wants to, but it gets stuck inside – as she says at one point, “like one of those sneezes that just won’t come”. The daily chaos that comes with running a business and a household of three children doesn’t make matters easier – it’s difficult to access soft feelings when life is hard.
When disaster strikes and Horatio picks Marlene to be his guardian angel, we see what she’s capable of, emotionally speaking. So Horatio is there to be loved. Although, pretty soon, Horatio has to prove that he’s a guardian angel too.