The Man Who Taught Me Discipline
January 31st marks the first anniversary of the release of The Drifter in the Wind, the first Jesse Clayton adventure. It may not be a New York Times Bestseller (yet) but it didn’t do too badly as it shot up the Westerns best-seller list on Amazon.
To celebrate his first birthday, and one of my proudest moments, I thought I might share a few of the things about how I brought him to life and how he helped me through one of my worst struggles with mental health.
Making Clayton
Set in 1885, as the Old West was full of outlaws, lawmen and the railway was spelling the beginning of the end for one of the most significant chapters in American history, I sought to write something that captured the spirit of the classical Western, with its spirit of hope and a hero who always finds a way, but set it in the dirty grit of a revisionist take that has seen such a resurgence in the Western genre. Could the two co-exist? What kind of character could pull that off?
I did a lot of research. By that, I mean reading a lot of Westerns (thank you Elmore Leonard, Cormac McCarthy, Zane Grey, Charles Portis and Charles Ray to name a few) watching a lot of film and TV and playing Red Dead Redemption. No, seriously. The attention to detail in that game went right down to horses’ balls.
It became clear that I needed a quick-witted, silver-tongued devil who could talk his way around a problem, but also have the ability to put a man down if he needed to. That way I could pull together the bleaker notes of the Old West, and have this character face them head on.
But to do that, he needed a reason, and so a past. And from there I kept finding there was more and more I needed. And so I read, researched (played) a lot more until I was ready to put pen to paper.
And then I needed a name. Man, that was hard. It had to be like Bond or Reacher.
A simple name that rolls off the tongue to be memorable. I went through so many name generators and filled pages in my notebook until I settled on a shortlist. At one point he was going to be Kit Kincaid, Burgess Frazier, Ace Sinclair, Logan Stokes. I couldn’t tell you how I settled on Jesse Clayton, but it stuck pretty quickly.
The Value Of Discipline
I learned a lot about the craft. Sure, I’d written a couple of novels that will never see the light of day before, and even dabbled in historical fiction. But the real lightning bolt moment was discipline over inspiration. Writing a minimum of a page a day, no matter what, instead of waiting for inspiration to strike was a game-changer. Because it never ended at just one page. Some days three, four, five. I wrote the last three chapters looking out at a beach in Cornwall.
Discipline is one of the greatest tools you can have. To be able to do that one thing every day no matter what, in a moment where even getting out of bed was really hard to do, proved to be a great anchor for my writing career. I had that book done within two months. Getting those pages done first thing got my brain going to do other projects, and I’ve never been more consistent or prolific in anything since.
Mentally, it had been a really rough time. I live with Anxiety, and after a breakdown so bad it affected me physically, I had to turn my back on almost 8 years of working in Primary education. I couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t do much of anything. Even enjoying the things I used to felt like a chore. When Nick put out the article about Dusty Saddle Publishing looking for unknown new authors, it was my fiancée who encouraged me to give it a go. I often wonder how things may have turned out had it not been for her and that article in the now-gone Writers’ Forum.
Fun Fact: Drifter was originally released as the very short-lived Fortune Favors the Dead. It was up for about three days before it got pulled as Amazon weren’t happy about the name resembling an ‘upcoming project’ of theirs.
Get In Touch and Get a Copy!
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Drifter is the first chapter in a series following our wandering hero. Check him out in A One-Way Ticket to Ruin and Mother Nature’s Mercy too!
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