I promise there’s a good reason for this.

I was perusing old drawings in my folder and found this one from several years ago–maybe 2012, I unfortunately didn’t put a date on it–and realized I had forgotten about it.

It was one of my first attempts at combing a few regular images I’d traced in CorelDRAW, which was the poor Canadian attempt at re-creating Adobe Illustrator at a lower price and higher bug count. For reasons I cannot feign to recall, I attempted a fusion of Clint Eastwood and a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, called (wait for it) “Clint Eastwood Ninja Turtle.”

But Graham! Why did you do this? You monster!

The manuscript I was working on at the time was, I think, called RESOLUTE. It was about high school football in Oklahoma…with gargoyles. (I have scrapped this idea and occasionally think of ways to salvage it, but I am not hopeful.) Anyway, I kept coming to certain scenes that got wildly distant from the story I was trying to tell, and I had no idea how to corral them back together. So I drew for a while to clear my head.

C.E.N.T. was the eventual product of one of these brain-clearing sessions, and suddenly I had a thought: I knew where I wanted the story to go, I just didn’t always know how to get there. When I reached those junctions on the story-map, Clint Eastwood Ninja Turtle would arrive on the page, take my main characters by the hand, and escort them through that scene or chapter (with a brief paragraph, highlighted in red so I could find it) and tell them where to go from there.

This is a terrible thing to do in final drafts, but a very nifty trick for early drafts. Good Old Clint hasn’t shown up in any of my early drafts for a while now, but he was there in spirit when I worked on THE KORBADELL JOB a few months ago.

Since Clint Eastwood is a real person and the Ninja Turtles are a copyrighted property, there’s no way in hell I can lay any sort of legal claim to either of these figures, nor do I really care to. I’m just putting him out there for my fellow writers to use as needed. If you’re bogged down in an early draft, let Clint Eastwood Ninja Turtle save the day! Write him into that paragraph!

Fade in. “And then C.E.N.T. showed up to grab Bella by the hand and said ‘You’re gonna keep trying to hook up with that sparkly, wimpy vampire, even though that hot shirtless wolf-dude isn’t trying to kill you, punk.’ And he led her to Edward, for…reasons. ‘We’ll come back to that. Cowabunga.'” Fade out.

Or, more likely, you’re a better writer than I am and this doesn’t happen to you in draft one. So leave him here and go enjoy your uncomplicated, unfrustrating writing life, you terrible demon you.

Carry on.