The Instructor by T.R. Hendricks
TPP EP 17

TPP Episode 17 with T.R. Hendricks

Mark: ​[00:00:00] What makes a great thriller tick and what does it take to write one? Welcome to the Thriller Pitch podcast, where bestselling award-winning and emerging thriller authors share their craft research and real world experiences that power today’s most gripping stories. I am your host, mark p Jay Nadal, and this is episode 17.

Whether you’re writing thrillers or can’t get enough of reading them, this show takes you inside the minds of the authors, behind the twists, characters, and moments that keep us turning the page.

This week I’m joined by TR Hendricks, author of the instructor. A former Marine Hendricks talks about channeling real world training and discipline into his writing, building authenticity into action scenes, and how his journey from 60 rejections to publication became its own story of [00:01:00] perseverance. Tim, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here today.

Tim: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me on. Really appreciate

Mark: I have been looking forward to this since I cracked open the book, the instructor. Thank you for the copy. This was a blast from the past, which we’ll get into, but I’ll let you pitch it before I talk too much.

Tim: Sure, sure. Yeah, so the instructor, it’s my debut novel, came out 2023. It’s Derek Harrington. He’s a retired marine force recon warrant officer who is reintegrating into society, getting back onto his feet after 21 years in the Marine Corps. And he’s down on his luck. He’s divorced from his wife. He’s estranged from his son. His father is ailing. The bills are mounting up and his fledgling Wilderness Survival School, which is his own business as an entrepreneur is, is failing. And, he can’t meet the necessities of his life. [00:02:00] In comes a offer that one of his students presents to him at end of his class.

Saying, we have a private group in upstate New York that would like to offer you $20,000 for one month of training provided you remain completely anonymous as to who we are and what we’re doing, and, Derek thinks better of it at first, but ultimately, with all of the challenges that he’s facing, he decides to accept the job at which point he goes upstate begins training this group in their private camp on land out in the middle of the wilderness, to which he suddenly and slowly begins to unravel what he suspects is the plot of a group of domestic terrorists.

Mark: Awesome. Thank you. So, yeah, that was really good. So yeah, [00:03:00] so what sparked the idea for this book?

Tim: So the idea was, it was pretty funny. My friend, his name’s Rob, Rob is, was kind of the, schematic or blueprint type individual that I based Derek off of in terms of like his statistical background. Rob was Marine Force Recon. Rob is a Wilderness Survival instructor and we were working together in a private security firm at the time, and we were just doing some kind of standard water cooler discussions about our veteran tails.

You put two veterans in a room together and we just won’t stop talking. And he told me that when Bear Grills and Les Stroud, survivor Man and and Alone was another big one, and I was coming, all these survivor shows were coming out, not sure Survivor of the Game Show, like survival out in the wilderness, teaching you how to make fires with sticks and stuff like that.

They were [00:04:00] all coming out and he told me he was in the running for getting his own show, but essentially the producers of that particular show wanted him to divulge a lot of his top secret background that he had held while he was in the Marine Corps. Wanted him to divulge stories that he wasn’t legally or ethically willing to do so and so they basically passed on him.

They said that was our whole angle. We were gonna have you telling a story from your military career and mixing it with the survival skill and if you’re not gonna give us the military stuff, then we’ve got no use for him. And that, that pissed me off something, something, something fierce. Because the, I think the actual words that they told him was, without that you’re just a boring house dad from Long Island.

And that really pissed me off when I heard that, ’cause this dude’s anything but boring. So I, I came up with the idea. I was writing short stories at the time. I was making a more of a commitment [00:05:00] towards writing full novel. In fact, I had already written one and queried one, and it had failed spectacularly.

So I was kind of in the mood for something to, pick myself up off the floor from that first go around. And, um, I said, Rob, you know, I write these stories on the side. I, I, you know, I have fun with it. It’s more of a hobby, but I’m trying to break into publishing with a full length book.

I was like, how about I write a short story that we could pass off as like your, based on a true story background, right? And it was all in fun and games, there was nothing serious behind it. Rob said, yeah, go ahead. Have fun. You know, go, go, go write your short story. Never expecting anything of it, was like he wasn’t gonna take it and go out to Hollywood with it and be like, oh, wait, here, no, I’ve got an actual background for you now.

Nothing like that was gonna happen. And what started as a, we, you know, we hashed out a couple ideas, in there and we wanted to do a few things, involving the FBI [00:06:00] and what, you know, kind of a, a counter-terrorist plot might look like. But for the most part, I just took his schematic background, you know, kind of where he was deployed, his skills, his wilderness survival, and I imported that as the character into this plot, into the story.

And it started like, it was gonna be kind of a couple of page narrative just to give him that base on a true story background. And then it turned into like a 10 page short story, and then it just took on its own life. I was a man possessed and I wrote the entire first draft in 90 days.

The first draft was 90,000 words. I wrote it in 90 days. Literally sitting with a laptop. In bed. My, my wife at the time asleep next to me 3:00 AM and I’m clacking away, and so that’s where it all came from. And like I said, no one could have expected that it would be the first book that would actually get published and be my debut and [00:07:00] everything. But that’s kind of how things happen sometimes, you know?

Mark: Yeah. Did he uh, beta read that for you

Tim: He did. Yeah. Yeah, he did. His father did as well. The, it was after the first draft, so it was very early on in the process. But yeah, he, he ghost read it. He’s credited in the book as well. And every once in a while I’ll, I’ll touch base with him on a little anecdotal survival skill.

Then I was like, Hey, if we put Derrick in this situation, what would be something that you could use? And he’ll like, oh yeah, try, the dogwood tree. Yeah, just little things like that, because I did a ton of research. I always do a ton of research on all my books that I write.

But I did a ton of research on the wilderness survival. But if you can actually go to, like someone who’s a practitioner of it, it’s like, yeah, people mistake that all the time. They’re like, oh, you must be a survival expert. Like, no, no, no, no. I’m, I’m well read in the subject, but there’s a difference between making primitive stone tools with your hands and actually [00:08:00] being able to feasibly do that versus just reading about how it’s done. So, you know, you throw me out there like, I’m, I’m gonna be starving like the next guy. That’s, that’s, that’s for sure.

Mark: Yeah. So how much of the book was from your own military background and experience? There were some scenes that were like a blo, like I’ve served in the Canadian reserves in the infantry. So when you were, when there were moments in this book, and I don’t think there’s spoilers, but there are moments where he’s throwing CS gas into a house and everyone’s coming out with snot up their nose and stuff, and I’m just like, oh my God, I remember those moments. They’re terrible. So I’m reading this book and, which was what I loved about it, is that that whole survival thing and in the beginning was very strong for me because,

Tim: Mm-hmm.

Mark: because of all that, I was like, man, I like, I know this guy. I like, I feel like I’ve been there. I know what he’s talking about and exactly what everyone’s going through.

Tim: Sure. I I always say that I break Derrick down into three parts with the, the first part being what we just talked about with all kind of the, the [00:09:00] biographical information from that I based him off of from my buddy. I say all the good stuff about Derek, his being a dedicated father and just a man willing to sacrifice for other people and give you a shirt off his back. All that good stuff I modeled after my father and then all the stuff that Derek does where you’re kind of cringing and you’re like, ah, this, this, that’s, it’s kind of messed up what this guy is doing or what he’s going through. That all came from my personal experience, so some of it is very much, or a lot of it in that guise when you break it down into those kind of buckets that nasty stuff comes directly from my experiences, certainly, and, and the experiences of other individuals that are, that were confident enough to confide in me some of their stories as well, and I never plagiarize those or anything like that. But they’ll talk to me about their experiences and those will kind of shape some [00:10:00] of the things that I put the characters into. ‘Cause again, it’s all just adds to that realism and, and gives you that feel of being there and going through it. The the CS gas scene, I actually based off of the opening first few minutes of the Navy Seals Hell week when they’ll have these guys just, you know, whatever the Navy SEAL class is.

They’re just lying around in a classroom waiting for hell week to begin. They know it’s gonna start that day. They just don’t know what time. And then usually like the door flies open at 3:00 AM and flash bangs and tear gas are thrown into the room and they’re getting screamed at. And they come out and they’re getting hit with a fire hose of freezing water.

And there’s machine guns going off and everything and just meant to be so disorienting and throw them into a complete panic and really kick off Hell week with this, crazy, crazy introduction, trial by fire as it were. But, or you see like [00:11:00] little anecdotal things throughout the story that are just kind of your more mundane, like I was, I wasn’t special forces or special operations. I served five years, on the conventional side of the army. I was a tank officer and then halfway through my career I switched over to military intelligence. So there’s just like a lot of the run of the mill just kind of nonsense that you put up with in the day to day of the military.

Like the hurry up and waits and just, little lingo here and there and how the, the dining facility is set up. You know, just little stuff like that that I think comes through because you can only get it into that level of detail from people who have actually lived it and done it a little bit.

So.

Mark: yeah. I was really, I love that about it, which was a

Tim: Mm.

Mark: fun. Were there scenes where you. After like say the first draft, you had to either back off on the realism because it was almost too shocking for readers or vice versa, where there was some where like, I think this is gonna be worse than what I wrote.[00:12:00]

Tim: Yeah. It’s funny, both my agent and my editor, had to tell me a couple times to tone it down and I was actually of the. Impression when I handed it in, saying like, tone it down I haven’t even gotten started yet. So that’s a peek into how depraved my mind works. You know, like, I’m like, ah, this is nothing.

And they’re like, no, you’re literally ripping teeth out of people’s mouths. Like you, you have to, you have to tone that down. And I was like, okay, fine. Yeah, two instances. Really when Derek is doing kind of the seer training introduction to the class in upstate New York and he starts putting ’em through the ringer a little bit.

That was originally very, very heavy handed in the, in the first draft. And thankfully, this is why I always wanted to go traditional. There was a lot of things wrong with the first draft, but, having people, having those eyes of people that work professionally in the industry every day. That’s what I really wanted.

You know, I wanted that [00:13:00] because they know what works and what doesn’t, and they can look at a manuscript, and even though it might be very well done the first time, they’re gonna take it up to the next level. So they said, everything that you’re doing in this scene is cool, but it’s just, we don’t know, you know that these guys might be the bad guys. You as the author meaning me, but the reader isn’t gonna know at this point. So when he’s doing these things to these guys, it really makes him look like an asshole. And I went, oh, well, yeah, that, that makes a lot of sense. You know, because we haven’t established who’s a good guy, bad guy yet, you know, and so it makes Derek look like the bad guy, essentially.

Working through that kind of thing. And then there was another instance which involved, blood. I love telling the story. A pack of blood thirsty dogs that had been basically trained to ma and to to kill people. And the bad guys are planning on using them at some point. And I have a [00:14:00] scene, I had a scene where a boy in the camp gets attacked by one of these dogs and Derek is the closest.

He jumps in, saves the kid, kills the dog. Right. And both again, my agent, my editor said, you can’t kill a dog. I’m like, what do you mean I can’t kill a dog? I’m like, this isn’t, this isn’t some cutesy, wootsy little thing this is, you know, a blood thirsty dog that is in the process of mauling, of ravaging, like an 11-year-old boy.

Like, yeah, I can kill that dog. They go, can’t kill a dog. Can’t kill a dog. The, the, the whole public will turn against you. And I love dogs, right? I’m, I’m one of those love dogs more than people kind of thing. So like, all right, I, I’ll take your word for it. So I take the whole thing out. Wouldn’t you know it like, I don’t know, maybe a month or two later, I think.

I don’t really know. I don’t know when the movie came out, but John Whit comes out and like within the first 10 minutes there’s a little beagle puppy, the [00:15:00] cutest puppy in the world, getting his head stomped in. And I’m like, whoa, whoa. What, what the hell?

Mark: yeah,

Tim: Like, you can’t kill a dog and then you just set off this, you know, four movie, five movie franchise by killing a dog in the first 10 minutes, you know, so whatever.

It’s fine.

Mark: so you wrote this book in 90 days, which is very impressive. Were there moments where you almost like, were gonna give up on it? I mean, I guess I would assume not. 90 days is so fast.

Tim: I mean, yeah, it was, it was 90 days for the draft. I think it was probably, you know, full year or so of working through it. I don’t know if I ever was in a point when I was drafting and editing where I was like, ah, this isn’t gonna work. The, the story was there, right? It wasn’t, it wasn’t one of those stories that an author writes and then hits a brick wall of 50,000 words or whatever and has to put it away because they just don’t know what they’re doing with it anymore.

I knew that story [00:16:00] beginning to end in my head before I even started putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard. So I, I, I wasn’t that part of it. I think the giving up part was when I queried it and I was, I went out, I, I had done, I told you about the first book I had done that failed spectacularly.

It failed as a book, but it was a success in that it taught me so much about the industry process of how to get traditionally submitted and land an agent and all that other stuff. So I had this whole kind of system laid out with how I would try, how I would locate agencies and then the agents within those agencies.

And I would, I would put it all into this kind of massive spreadsheet that I kept and then would write down certain things that they were looking for or how they wanted their query letter specifically formatted. And then I would tailor those much like a job search where you might [00:17:00] do tweaking your resume a little bit to each individual job versus just sending one blanket resume out there.

‘Cause there is no one size fits all with the query process. And even with all that, even with that systematic approach, well organized, you know, very diligent in doing it. I’d come home from work, you know, eat dinner. Kids would go to bed and I’d sit there start tailoring, query letters, sending out three, four a night depending on where I was in the research process.

Even with doing that, I think I got up to something around 60 or 65 agents that I had either researched or actually sent a letter out to. And I’d only gotten two responses out of that. And out of the two responses, they both requested falls, which was amazing. But then one of the two agents passed on it after reading the fall.

So I was, back to square one and then it was just my [00:18:00] other agent, Barbara Poel, who, stayed with it and wrote it, and she actually got on the phone after she read it with me. It was the call, every, every writer, aspiring author wants the call when an agent says, Hey, let’s get on the phone and talk about this.

And so we did that and she didn’t sign me right away. She gave me a revise and resubmit where I had to go back and take her notes and revise the manuscript into more of what her vision was looking like. And it was only after I did that, and again, taking that industry knowledge and putting it into the manuscript to make it better and reworking it.

It was only after I was able to do that that she actually signed me and did that. So I never, I never quit on it throughout the process, but had Barbara pass I might’ve shelved it at that point because I had done an exhaustive, querying process and I didn’t really think there was anybody left after that, you know, so it [00:19:00] might’ve been all right, shelve this one, and we’ll come back to it another time, hopefully.

But yeah, I, I never gave up on it as a, as an actual story that I was writing. It’s more of, it was, it was really down to the wire there as to whether or not it was gonna, it was gonna land me representation, which it did. So, thankfully, thankfully it did.

Mark: I love that story of resilience it’s so easy to get like one or two rejections and then just decide it’s never gonna happen

Tim: Sure.

Mark: you’ve, and you sent so many, even before you got the first one back, which is, which is fantastic.

Tim: Yeah. I, I. I don’t recommend this methodology, but coming from the military with a couple of deployments to Iraq under my belt, um, getting a rejection letter really in the grand scheme of my perspective, it really didn’t bother me that much. It was just, okay, you gotta break an omelet to make some, break an omelet.

You need to break some eggs to make an omelet. And that’s, that’s kind of my approach to the whole thing was, well, at the [00:20:00] end of the day, if I get rejected i’m not gonna stop writing stories. I love doing it i’m just gonna keep doing it and keep improving. Hopefully at some point. Like, this is my goal I want to be published, so let’s just rock and roll with it. But yeah, don’t join the military and go overseas and get blown up a couple times to gain the perspective that a rejection letter isn’t the end of the world. Like, just realize that it’s not the end of the world and, and take my word for it, you know, and go and go that

Mark: Yeah. Yeah. I love that.

Tim: Yeah.

Mark: Getting into character a little bit. Derek’s character, when he started off in the book, he’s pretty intense and it’s like he’s battling with some trauma. You can already tell in the way he responds to people. I thought that was, that was. I don’t, I wouldn’t necessarily say risky, but usually when you get introduced to a character, you’re looking for reasons to like them.

And in, in some sense, you gave us reasons not to like Derrick off the bat. Like you have to give him a chance with what he’s going through to understand what he’s going through. How did you, like, how did that all get built [00:21:00] and, and in your mind and when you, when you develop Derrick as a character.

Tim: Well, I, I think it was one because you had, well, one, it was, this book in particular was exceptionally cathartic for me. So a lot of the issues that Derek deals with in terms of reintegration from the military back into civilian life and his issues with post-traumatic stress disorder. Those are a lot of real life if not the actual emotions and outbursts that happen down to actually specific instances that I repurposed.

Because again, I want to write what, you know, that old cliche, right? I wanted to give. The realism of what guys and gals who experience this, what it feels like. And so I use my own experiences to do so. But then when you take it in the course of the story arc, kind of, I can’t waste time making you like Derrick only to [00:22:00] then show you how much crap he’s going through.

Right? Like, like there’s only 90,000 or a hundred thousand words to play with. And so the, the kind of, the, the, the outset was I gotta draw the audience in, draw the reader in with all of his flaws up front. Just you see him just laid out and see this guy who’s really at his wits end and just needs to catch a break.

And it is a risk because like you said, like people might be like, this guy, Derek’s kind of an asshole. I, I don’t, I don’t want to keep reading past this. But what I tried to do was say, it’s not him necessarily that is offputting. It’s the stuff that he’s dealing with, the way he’s reacting to it.

But underneath it all, if you really look at Derrick, especially, you go all the way through the end, underneath it all, he’s really a just a good man who’s trying to be a good man [00:23:00] and because of his circumstances because of the, the kind of the raw deal that life has given him a little bit and all the things that he’s trying to overcome, both outwardly and inwardly and, and tho all those battles that he’s going against.

Yeah. He doesn’t react the best, in, in all of those situations, but his overarching character is that he is a man of integrity. He is a man that’s trying to do the right thing. He’s trying to get back to his son. He’s trying to be a good ex-husband, if not, reigniting and, and reuniting with his ex-wife.

You know, he’s, he wants to do right by his father even though he and his father don’t have a good relationship, you know? So, to, in order to propel the story forward and to all, and to have that as the momentum behind his actions, I really had to kind of start you with it right up front. In the first chapter, he’s [00:24:00] bitching and moaning because he’s dealing with civilians that are like, you know, one guy’s can’t get his fire started right. And you know, a couple people are, a couple guys are on a a bachelor party and a couple other people are like trying to hike the Appalachian Trail and he’s teaching ’em all wilderness survival. I mean, you know, he’s got that very career military mindset of like, I was in charge of whole divisions worth of equipment and millions of dollars and had the ultimate responsibility and now here I am teaching rubbing sticks together to a bunch of guys on their bachelor party, you know, so, and it’s like, man, look how far I’ve fallen. And that’s, that’s a large part of it too, is, is, you know, so you see his, his loss of self. He doesn’t know how to define his own character post-military, which is a huge thing a lot of people go through.

But you see those [00:25:00] negative reactions because he’s in that head space of like, I can’t stand this guy. If, if, if this guy was one of my corporals in Marine Corps, I would’ve bounced his head off the wall already. And people hear that. I’m like, oh my God, this guy’s an idiot. But it’s like, it’s, it’s the truth of it and I wanted that to come through. I wanted that to shine through with, with his character.

Mark: It did. I appreciated how it started. It caught me a little bit off guard ’cause I’m not used to seeing it. But as, as I got to know him and it weirdly wasn’t that long as I got to know him, I really appreciated what he was going through and that you, you led with that. That was, that was really good.

Tim: Great. Great. Go ahead. Thank you.

Mark: And when you crafted Marshall, he’s an interesting character.

Tim: Yeah. Little

Mark: he come from and how did, how did you craft him from, I don’t want to, again, I don’t wanna give a spoilers, but he’s quite the character as the story develops.

Tim: yeah, I love to, I love to cast my characters with Hollywood stars, right? I I, I do if you go on my Instagram, you can scroll back it’s a [00:26:00] while now. It’s like two years ago now. But I did like a whole post of four different iterations of what the cast of the instructor would look like if it was ever made into a movie or a television series.

And I do that. Just one, it’s fun. Two, it’s a good interaction with readers to see who they’re thinking of if anybody, when they’re, when they’re reading the story. But three, it really, it helps me as I’m writing, as a visualization, like seeing these individuals that I’ve picked out in my mind.

You know, oh, Jessica Chastain is playing Sarah and Idriss, Elba is playing Derek, you know, as, as one iteration, one example, and the one who always came through for me, not just from a physical standpoint, but also his, his portrayal of the character was, Stephen Lang as the evil Colonel in Avatar.

Mark: Okay.

Tim: Who I, I just, I absolutely love Steven Lang. You don’t realize the range [00:27:00] this guy has. He was actually in Tombstone as one of the, the, the Cowboys in there. Ah, I forgot the character’s name now, but somebody will, somebody will comment on it at this point, but he was just so, I just had him in mind and I was like, if I put a, you know, red and black checkered flannel on him and just made him kind of a little bit of an older, broken down guy and then from there it just spiraled into, okay, well what kind of background can we give him? And, and what kind of story can we have that makes Marshall turn into the person that he ends up being? And there was another, I, again, I don’t wanna give spoiler either, but there was a specific topic of a certain brand of leadership, let’s put it that way, a certain brand of leadership that I did a deep dive into. It was fascinating ’cause I always found it, a fascinating topic to begin with. But that started to really mold when I started [00:28:00] pulling out those characteristics of individuals that seemed to occur in all of them and their followers.

I’m starting to bleed into the spoiler area, but like, but like, you know, starting to kind of really assemble those characteristics that all those individuals had in common. And then it was taking the backstory that I had for Marshall and merging those all together. And then all of a sudden you have this, this guy that is quite quite diabolical, toward, towards the end of it, you know, when you realize what his actual goal is. And I don’t, I like, like, yeah, his, his actual goal is terrible. But what I really like and hate about Marshall is the bastardization or, or the corruption, if you will, of what he’s using to get these people to that point the way he is toying with these people’s lives, [00:29:00] toying with what they’ve gone through, the horrible things they’ve gone through, and he might seem like a savior to them, but really he’s taking all this and secretly bending it to his own will to enact his own terrible plan.

I found that to be the most like evil of, of him, not, not necessarily his end state, but that he’s just looking at any single person at any given time and thinking, how can I leverage this person from my ultimate end state? And he doesn’t really, he really doesn’t give a shit about anybody despite saying that he does, he’s just got that ultimate goal in, in mind.

So, that, that’s what I really enjoyed writing with him was like, ’cause when you look at that, you’re like, oh wow, this guy’s. This guy’s an evil, SOB, what he’s trying to do and how he’s using people to do it.

Mark: Yeah, and it’s interesting ’cause I wasn’t even sure for the longest time if I was supposed to like him or not. ’cause he almost, he’s almost likable for a while. And then when the switches start, you know, you start catching on to what’s happening. You’re [00:30:00] like, oh wow, that’s messed up. But it all makes sense.

It wasn’t, it wasn’t a removal of character like he was on point the whole time. You just didn’t know it as the reader until the reveals, I guess you could say come up And it was, yeah, it was so fun. Oh. Question from Maria Franklin. So we have the thing where we have an author come on,

Tim: Oh,

Mark: last author asks the next author a question.

Tim: Oh, that’s

Mark: So her question, Maria Franklin, my last guest Ro asked, how much of your real life ends up in your novel?

Tim: Yeah, so we, we covered that a little earlier, with basically a lot of my military experiences. I, I like to tell people when they’re talking about joining the military, I was like, look, 80% of people that join the military have a kind of run of the mill some good, it is like an average experience.

They have some good, some bad, on whole, it’s not, it’s not a terrible experience for them. 10% seem to step in it wherever they go. And it’s just amazing. They just get the best assignments, the best commanders, the best [00:31:00] equipment every, they never have a problem, you know, they they’re in Sicily and then they’re doing an internship in Great Britain and then they get stationed in Hawaii and you’re like, all right guy, whatever.

Luck lucky for you. You know? It just happens. It happens to some people. And then that last 10%, or the guys and gals that step in it in the other direction where everything is a bust, from beginning to end, everything is a bust. And that’s how I kind of classified my experience, five, five years in and I was like this, this is not what I had in mind at all. And I came out, and then I came out right at the time that the housing bubble burst here, and we had the recession of 2008, 2009. So all the reintegration stuff, it was about 12, 12 months after getting out that happened. So all the reintegration into society.

Now I’m laid off. My wife at the time is pregnant with our first child. Now all the [00:32:00] PTSD is coming out at the same time. So like all of that was fuel for what it eventually would come into. And so, when I was in a place where I could actually access that stuff instead of tamping it all down and but where I could actually use it

it, it became, you know, fuel for the fire that, that I would then pour into the story. So, so very much, a lot of my own personal experience ends up in the novel and even subsequent stories that I’ve written, I’m always kind of putting some sort of angle of myself into the book. Just because I think it, it gives you that accessibility again, that true to life feeling of, oh, I can relate to this guy, or, oh, I remember that movie.

It’s funny that the author used that movie line here to describe that because I remember that, you know, just little things like that, I think are invaluable and kind of [00:33:00] set your own voice as an author.

Mark: Do you ever find yourself almost wanting to defend things that happen in the instructor from, I don’t know, like a review or somebody who has no idea?

Tim: Oh, it was so, it’s so funny you say that. My face lit up when you said that. So, it, it, so, Taylor Moore, who’s a friend, he’s an author. I don’t know if you’ve had him on or not. If you haven’t, you need to have him on. I, he writes this, this awesome series, the Garrett Cole series. Okay. And Taylor is former CIA, right? Smart guy, sharp as a whip. He comes originally, he hails from Texas, I believe. Taylor, if I got that wrong, you know, just correct me if I’m pretty sure he was in Texas. So I asked him to we connected at Thriller Fest in New York City and it was in between books one and two. I asked him to read and blurb the Infiltrator, my sequel, and he said, okay, cool, but I gotta read the instructor first. So he starts reading the instructor, and Taylor calls me, [00:34:00] about, I don’t know, probably the first third of the book he calls me, he goes, yeah, I don’t know if I’m gonna be able to blurb your books. And I went, what?

What’s, what’s the matter? He goes, well, you know. You’re kind of shitting all over Republicans, which I wasn’t. I’m I’m completely like, I, I try to stay completely independent. I don’t like touching politics, at all. But I guess he, he was seeing something that he was reading into it along those lines.

And he is like, and your characters like, I get it there are all these like backwoods yokels, you know, the good old country boys. And, and he’s like, I, I, you know, and then there was a whole angle with some of Marshall’s corruption that I, that I spoke to earlier about. And he didn’t necessarily care for that either.

And I actually talked to Taylor for like an hour on the phone convincing him, no, you have, you have to get through this to the end. And even if you get through it to the end [00:35:00] you need to read my acknowledgements afterwards. ’cause I explained a couple things in the, in the acknowledgements too, of where I was going with this whole story.

And I was like, don’t, don’t take it on face value of the first two, three chapters where I’m just, you know, making a political statement or, or bashing I’m, I’m a city guy ’cause I’m from Long Island. I’m not a city guy. I live in the suburbs, but like. I’m a city guy bashing on, you know, the, the good old boys from the backwoods of Alabama or something like that.

Like, no, I’m like, that’s not, I promise you that’s not the case. And he was very gracious. He’s like, all right man. He’s like, you convinced me. I’ll, I’ll finish the books. And he ended up finishing not only the first book, but the second book gave me a really great blurb. And I was grateful for that.

But yeah, it was, it was like this rush to defense of, of the novel. ’cause I was like, no, please, you gotta read it all the way through. Because otherwise you’re not gonna get the things that I’m doing. You, you see those a lot. You see, I don’t read my reviews anymore. I did when it first, the books first come [00:36:00] out, but every once in a while we put somebody, it’ll say, you did not finish on it.

But I found that those are more and more ludicrous the reasons behind those. So I just stopped paying attention to ’em, you know, it was like, I didn’t read this book, but my wife f, saw the F word on page two and we don’t allow that in our home. So I’m like, okay. I get, you know, just absurd things like, you know, never read the book, but didn’t like the red letters on the cover. One star. I’m like, how do you, how do you, yeah, it is just become so crazy with it. So I don’t even pay attention to that stuff.

Mark: Wow, that’s a new one. I haven’t heard that before. Don’t like the red

Tim: Oh, yeah, there’s a million of ’em. Yeah, I know. Who knows?

Mark: What advice would you give someone who just published their first or second book, either traditional or self-published?

Tim: Yeah. It’s on you. The publishing industry is a grind, [00:37:00] right? It is a machine. That keeps going no matter what day in and day out every week there’s another five, six books coming out in every genre. And unless you are one of, it’s kind of a weird contradiction because unless you are a well-established name, like, I see on your shelf there in the back a Tom Clancy, a ache, you know.

Unless you’re one of those huge names that is a guaranteed sale of millions of copies, you’re not going to get big dollars in terms of marketing and publicity and everything like that. You might have a junior publicist assigned to you if you’re traditionally published, like I was, who just because of the workload that they have

I is maybe gonna book you one event, you know? So if you think that you’re a brand new author and you’re gonna be sent on a global tour where you’re signing and everything, no you’re [00:38:00] not like you need to put your own graphics together. You need to be calling the bookshops. You need to be arranging the tours.

And keep yourself in that, marketing and public publicity space if you want to. Other people are, are content with just having the book out and never setting foot outside their, their apartment or their house ’cause they just want it, they just wanna write and that’s fine.

There’s nothing wrong with that. I wanted the other way of going. But you have to, you know, put your pedal to the metal in terms of that grind early on. Why I say it’s a, a strange contradiction is because, well, how do you become a huge name that sells millions and millions of copies if there there’s never any like early on support so you have to, you have to kind of cultivate that in your own right in order to get to the point where, oh, okay, now you’re a big name.

Now we can put some. Support behind you. So just like anything else in life, I think, you know, [00:39:00] just you have to do the grind and put in the work. It doesn’t stop once you’ve signed that agent contract. It doesn’t stop when you’ve signed your, you’ve sold your first book doesn’t stop when your first book is out.

Like, it’s just, if you really want it, you gotta, you gotta put in the work. You gotta keep going.

Mark: I appreciate you sharing that. ’cause I think there’s a lot of people that don’t realize, they think if they get their first book out that the fans are lining up in the big dollars and it’s

Tim: yeah, yeah. Don’t, don’t quit your job. That’s the,

Mark: yeah, the 1% may have

Tim: one. You’ll get, you get a nice advance, but then you don’t realize it is broken out in three separate installments that’ll be over three years. With, you know, a third of it taken away for taxes, at least here in the States or whatever, taken, taken away for taxes is just and people are like, oh, look at this I could quit my job or I can write full time. Don’t do that. Don’t do that. Don’t,

Mark: So last question. Where [00:40:00] can listeners find your books and find out more about you?

Tim: Sure. So I have my, my own website. It’s tr hendricks author.com. You can go on there. It’s got a bunch about the books and stuff. There’s actually, I had an old WordPress website before my, I launched my professional site for the, for the instructor. Where I would put short stories up and I took all those short stories and I put them onto my author website.

So you can kind of like see the evolution of my writing. ’cause some of ’em were pretty bad, but I, I didn’t, I didn’t edit ’em, I just left them the way they were. So you can, you can see like kind of a, my early on short stories there. Up to the point where a couple of ’em were getting published in literary magazines and then when the book came out.

But then I’m on all these socials for the most part. On Instagram is my, my most prolific one where I do most of the posting. That’s at Reed, R-E-A-D-T-R Hendricks, that is the same address for [00:41:00] threads and the same handle for, TikTok. And then I’m on Twitter. I don’t call it X I call it Twitter still.

It’s capital T, capital R under Hendricks. But to be honest with you I really don’t use that one anymore. Like I’m, I’m on there. If people tag me or whatever, I’ll interact with it. Sometimes I’ll retweet something, but for the most part I’m on Instagram and, and Threads and TikTok is where you’ll find me for those.

And then I was printed under the Tour Forge Imprint, so that’s under McMillan. So you can go to McMillan’s website and McMillan, USA and find the books there as well.

Mark: Awesome. Thank you. I’ll link to a bunch of that in the show notes.

Tim: Great. Thank

Mark: Thank you so much for your time. This has been a lot of fun. Love

Tim: Yeah, it was a blast. It was great. Thanks so much.

Mark: looking forward to getting into the next book ’cause I have to know the continuation after the

Tim: Sure.

Mark: Well done, well played sir.

With that, the finish of the instructor to get me to need to know what [00:42:00] the hell.

Tim: Yeah. Well, if you think that was good, wait till the end of the second

Mark: Oh no. Then you’re gonna, then I’m gonna start bugging you to continue writing books. When’s the next one coming out? I’ll

Tim: yeah, exactly.

Mark: All right. So if you don’t mind sticking around for our after show Rapid Fire, that would be awesome.

Thank you.

Tim: Don’t mind at all. Let’s do it.

Mark: Thanks for listening and follow the show so you don’t miss episode 18 With mm DeLuca, author of the Divorce Party. We dig into writing multiple point of view thrillers, why she set the story in Las Vegas and the real world research that shaped it, plus her honest advice on promotion and publicity. Wanna go deeper? You can get early access, bonus content, and the after show with rapid fire questions plus the chance to ask future guests your own. Over on Patreon. The links in the show notes.