​Water always runs to the deepest point, to where the land is lowest. For me, the same is true of writing. The words fall into the places that lie deep beneath. I think of them as the 2am places. The ones you usually hide with conversation and movement. The voice in your head that you hear because the only other sound is the hum of the fridge and your own quiet footsteps through a sleeping house.
 
For me this place is no aquifer. Words do not gush out onto the page. It is just a thin seam of honesty that can occasionally be mined for words. 
 
Sometimes I dream in words, in loops and strands across a page. My own handwriting in blue ink. But by morning, like dew, the words have gone.
 
The process of drilling down into the place where the words lie, though always hard and sometimes even painful, is also occasionally illuminating. If the events that are written about are not autobiographical, the emotions surrounding them most certainly are.
 
The passage in my novel where Frank describes his grandfather's love of horses is, in some ways, the most revealingly autobiographical:

You’re a savvy equine business owner. You know your stuff, you’re passionate about horses and you believe in your products/services (and their ability to help the horse community out there). Yet the concept of digital marketing is enough to make you run for the hills, white flag in hand.

Unfortunately, it’s an all-too-common scenario. These days, we all have less time. For many of us, money is tight. Throw expensive and time-consuming horses into the mix, and you have a recipe for discarding digital marketing into the ‘too-hard’ basket.
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For those who are less Internet-savvy, I will start out by clarifying just what digital marketing is. Essentially, it’s any kind of marketing done via electronic media (i.e. the Internet, Apps, text messaging, etc). It is both measurable and instantaneous; great for those of us wanting to ‘squeeze every cent’ and that lack the time to plan campaigns months in advance!

Not only this, but there’s a far greater chance your equine business marketing will be successful if complemented by a sound digital strategy. Think about it. The target markets of most equine businesses are riders, right? Age-wise, the majority of riders out there are from a younger demographic. And what are young people good at these days? Technology, of course!