First, I have to make an admission. Cleigh wasn’t the character that sparked the story. It was supposed to be Sofie’s spotlight (more on her in a later post). I wanted to tell her story. However, I’m beginning to see a pattern that once I have the main story idea, I dream up a hero to work with my heroine and wind up falling for him instead. (Who knew I was this flighty?!) So, the initial idea of Cleigh was simply as a cohort for my leading lady.

Around this time, I’d been turned on to the book True Grit by Charles Portis and found it very engaging. I was interested for a couple of reasons. First, it was a classic garnering rave reviews so I wanted to know what all the fuss was about. Second, it’s the first book I’d ever seen that purposely avoids the use of contractions, which is a whole other language teacher/writer-nerd conversation. I was intrigued.

Because of this book, I initially gave Cleigh the profession of Marshal. However, there’s also a Texas Ranger in the mix, and out of confusion I decided to research the differentiation between US Marshals and state Rangers because up to that point I had no clue about either.

That led me to finding out that my home state of Colorado also had Rangers as a main law enforcement option until well into the 20th century. (What?! Rangers weren’t just a Texas thing?! Mind. Blown.)

Anyway, you can see why I simply had to go with a Colorado Ranger, right?

Now, during the writing of the book, I did come up against some issues regarding Rangers vs Denver PD, but that’s a bit much to go into for this post, if interested let me know, I’ll do a separate post on the Colorado history aspect of the story.

Last, but not least, the name. I’d developed an interest in the whole last-name-as-first-name trend, so was experimenting and keeping a running list of surnames that I thought would make good first names. At the time, I was working in a medical office, and one of the patient’s first names was Clayton. I really loved that, so decided to use it.

A bit convoluted at best, but it almost makes sense in my scattered brain. You can bet that the process is similar for most of my characters. If you enjoyed this post, let me know and I’ll continue to let you in on the process in the future. I hope you enjoyed this post and wind up falling for Cleigh just as hard as I did when he gets introduced to the world next month.

Coming up next week I’ll be sharing another writing process post, then follow that up with that info on my leading lady, Sofie. Stay tuned!