The Story Behind The Payout Game - The Man from Malta and combing through the ashes

This book almost didn’t happen. I could put it down to writer’s block or in the words of John Lennon: ‘Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans’, but by March this year, the book was stalled. Frozen.

Part of the problem I realised was the journals and notebooks were becoming an albatross around my neck. Instead of them being a map or a guide, they became a convenient go-to crutch. I had two notebooks filled with notes, scratchings and observations, but this particular year through ‘life’ in general it was a stop-go process; and I was leaning on them, re-reading and getting swamped with ideas that bore no relevance to the story. They became a fog.

Something had to be done. So one afternoon, everything went into the recycling (I did this on a Friday morning before heading to work, so I know they would be gone when I came home). Nine months of work jettisoned. Early handwritten drafts, chapters, print-outs and two full journals all mulched and recycled in the depot miles away from my door.

Expecting it to be cathartic somehow. I began to sense it was making things worse; the stalled momentum, was now floundering. Not frozen, but beginning to sink.

I went to Malta with my wife, Fiona, for the Easter weekend. And then something happened. At a Stations of the Cross procession during the wait for it to begin, a man walked past. A middle-aged man with peculiar features and a strange manner. He had climbed the barriers that lined the route and began walking toward the performers and he fitted somehow into the clogged narrative of the nascent WIP. 

He became part of the story’s fulcrum, in fact, he became the keystone.

That image of him shuffling toward the nonplussed performers stayed with me for the whole weekend, so much so that I did a small sketch of his profile on the hotel stationery. His physicality was just what I was looking for, and loosened the strait-jacket of the leaden plot.

The weekend break too had been a distraction. On the flight back to Dublin, I began to plan out the chapter this character would play a central role in.

Over the summer as I began to tackle the book again, I contacted and spoke with various creatives in other disciplines. I didn’t contact any writers until later. Speaking and emailing back and forth, it was the correspondence with a photographer who drew inspiration from his subjects and their enthusiasm that I remembered I had a lesser character, but who stayed with me. Her chatacter was enthusiastic and he she was perfect counter-weight to the protagonist, Crowe.

I began to build her higher into the story along with the Maltese Man and then the ideas began to flow. I’m no great chess player, but these two became to the story the ‘Major pieces’.

The story arc and plot began to become more malleable and I re-discovered (or recovered) the threads and began to develop the book along a different line.

And now, after eighteen months The Payout Game is ready for early 2026 release.

But for three straight months, I was ready to bin it all.

What I took from this process, what I learned (and every novel is a learning process) is sometimes to get things moving, you have to be ready to purge and burn and see what remians in the ashes.

which brings me to another great John Lennon quote "Creativity is a gift. It doesn't come through if the air is cluttered,"

The Payout Game launches 01.24.26