TPP Season 2, Episode 2 with J.L. Hancock

Mark: [00:00:00] Jim, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here today.

JL: Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

Mark: I have your book with me here. We’re gonna be talking about it today, the Hawk Enigma. Thank you so much for sending me a copy.

JL: Yeah. Thank you for taking it.

Mark: Let’s get right into the pitch.

JL: Yeah. So the Hawk Enigma is a book I wrote based on some of the work I used to do for Naval Special Warfare Command, which is the headquarters of the US Seal teams. And the main character works on something called the Directorate, which is a, an advanced research and development group. Uh, he also suffers from kind of a traumatic past, and he’s been having these reoccurring dreams and starting to hear some prophetic voices, and he believes that he’s actually losing his mind at the same time across the ocean in Japan to scientists working on something called the God algorithm have disappeared. He’s about to find that the disappearance of these scientists, the form of artificial intelligence they’ve been working on, and potentially his past, may have something to do with each other.

Mark: Nice. So [00:01:00] where did it all begin? Where did this idea originate from?

JL: So the concept of the Hawk Enigma actually started at a symposium at Caltech. I was with a friend of mine who was giving a lecture on aspects of artificial intelligence for the military back in 2019. And one of the professors at Caltech, her name was Viviana stepped up and started talking about something called optogenetics, they were using machine learning algorithms to identify specific proteins to treat people with like, uh, Parkinson’s or vision loss. the thing that’s crazy about this particular type of technology is it uses. to manipulate synaptic activity in the brain after injecting proteins into the fat and the lipids inside of your, your brain cells. so the concept was completely crazy. And it’s almost

Mark: Yeah.

JL: sort of hit me, I’d think, been thinking about writing [00:02:00] for a while, and some plots were not really there and I just didn’t know what I wanted to write about.

And then I went to that symposium and it was almost like, and I, I, this almost sounds cliche, but the plot literal, almost quite literally just popped in my head and was like, this is the kind of story that you want, you should dig into. And then I just, for there, I started writing and about six months later, I’d finished my first draft.

Mark: Six months. That’s very cool. I didn’t realize how much of, um, what you wrote certainly sounds authentic because of how you write about it, but I didn’t realize how close to reality it actually was. That’s amazing.

JL: Yeah. Outside of the application of some of the technology, about 95% of what I wrote in there is real,

Mark: Yeah.

JL: but, which

Mark: Wow.

JL: kind of crazy when you think about some of the topics that I get into in the story.

Mark: Yeah. How did you juggle so many things? You, I mean, you had the military, you have the rafting, you have the ai, you have like, it just, there’s so much going on.

JL: So there, it’s, it’s inevitable that an author puts a lot of themselves into the story. Uh, and initially it was, I just had this idea of braiding several stories [00:03:00] together based on certain topics that I knew really well. However, it also became a for exploring the characters in a use in a useful way.

And so I just wrote what made sense to me. I had never written a book before when I wrote this, and so

Mark: Wow.

JL: I wanted to create structure and I wanted to, so I, I spent a whole bunch of time really focusing on story, process and story structure and story. Character development and digging into what needed to work with the story, and then eventually committing to a full editorial process of getting, you know, a editorial assessment done to basically make sure the plot’s good and the developmental edit and all those other things that you gotta go through.

And the painful process of putting something out there that makes you feel vulnerable, and then allowing somebody to just completely rip it apart.

Mark: Yeah.

JL: And, uh, humbling myself to being willing to accept that criticism. But at the same time, it allowed for me to explore a whole bunch of topics that I, one, I understood well, but at the same time, I, I, I gave me a, [00:04:00] uh, an avenue for exploring the characters themselves in a way that I felt was, extremely important. Not just important, but exciting at the same time.

Mark: Were there a lot of changes between your first draft and the editorial, and when you did the editorial how did you find an, you almost must have needed an expert to even really comprehend a lot of the things that you were talking about in order to put it together for the end result.

JL: in some respects, yes. In other respects, no, because at the end of the day, you need to have the average reader under able to understand the story.

Mark: Yeah.

JL: if you make it complicated and they don’t get it, you failed, right? If it’s, was that balance between giving them the information they need to understand the plot and be and tr and read and what you’re writing as as authentic, at the same time, balancing that against what moves the story along.

And so there were moments where I was being too technical and it actually wrote me into corners because I was so technical that I couldn’t [00:05:00] hand wave certain parts that needed to be hand wave for the purpose of speed. So the editing process really just came back to, does this make sense for this character?

Or less about, does this make sense technologically? And

Mark: Okay.

JL: that’s what the editors really came in, and I actually took, I chose editors that were, did not understand the genre, but enjoyed the genre, if that makes sense. I didn’t

Mark: Okay. Okay.

JL: expert. My, my editor isn’t a technical expert and she writes, a lot of the feedback she would get me is she would say she things like, you’re too smart for your reader. Not as an insult to the reader, but

Mark: Yeah.

JL: an aspect, if you’re being too technical, just calm this down. Focus on the plot. Accept at, at the same time, give them nuggets that make it exciting and realistic.

Mark: How did you balance that? I guess it was just in the editing process. ’cause you could have told the story by being very, I, it’s a techno thriller, which people expect a little bit more of the information on the technology size and that’s, and you know it, so that’s great. But how did you [00:06:00] decide to balance just plain action with going deeper into the technology?

Because you could have, granted it would be a shorter book, but you could have kind of glossed over a lot of the explanation of the actual tech and how the proteins work and everything, and just told the story.

JL: There’s a, there’s a lot, there’s a lot of things I could have cut outta the story, but there’s a lot of things that I think that are critical for understanding, not just the way that the scientists chose to do the things that they did in the story, but embedded within the technology itself is the motivation of the individuals, and you can’t break the two apart.

I wanted to try and

Mark: Okay.

JL: in that when people are focused on technology like that, you, it is, it is a part of their entire personality. And the way that it’s not just that person likes computers, so they’re

Mark: Hmm.

JL: person. You know that it’s way beyond that.

Mark: Yeah.

JL: thing is, even in the, the third chapter of the book, the, the main character something called A [00:07:00] PFM Box. And that was a PFM, I say pure fricking magic in the book, but they use a different word in real life. But A-P-F-M-A-P-F-M is a term that we would use to people when they didn’t understand what the technology was inside of it. We just say, Hey, it’s a PFM box and it does its thing. And that way you don’t have to explain all the technical jargon to it. And so there’s a point where my character has to do that with the seals he’s working with. ’cause they don’t care about how the technical stuff works. They’re

Mark: Yeah,

JL: finds the people. And you’re like, yes. It finds the people. And they go, how do they do that? It’s like, it’s PFM, it’s, you know, it’s called a PFM box. And they go, oh, okay, great. I got it. And they don’t wanna ask questions ’cause they don’t wanna sound stupid, but at the same time it’s like,

Mark: yeah,

JL: it. the same time, I had to do that for two reasons. Had to do it for one, I needed to obfuscate actual real world technol technological capabilities that are sensitive while exploring the concept with the reader so it’s still exciting.

Mark: yeah,

JL: so I used, I, I used my experience with the seals to do that by hiding what I was [00:08:00] actually doing,

Mark: yeah, yeah, yeah. You mentioned, are you a big reader? You mentioned it took you six months to write this book, and this was your first book, which was very impressive. Are you a big reader of the genre prior to writing the book, I.

JL: I read some, I used to read a lot of Tom Clancy and a lot of, uh, some I read a bit of, of Jack Carr, but I, I read a lot of nonfiction and to be honest, when I started writing this is just what came out.

Mark: Okay.

JL: just picturing like a movie. I was like, if I were to write this, how a movie plays, what movie would I wanna watch? And so I wanted, I want, when you’re reading the book to feel like you’re watching a movie,

Mark: Mm-hmm.

JL: It to be at the speed of a movie. And that, that was more or less what I focused on, but the technology and the operations, I just focused I literally was like, how would I conduct this mission? How would, how long would it take for me to get from point A to point B? What kinds of things would be going on? And I, I just planned it as if it was a real world situation.

Mark: Okay.

JL: I, and driving off of the real world [00:09:00] aspect of it, it just turned into a thriller is more or less what happened. But if you ask about the reading that I do, I, I did read in the genre four, but I’ve also read a lot of other genres at the same time.

Mark: A lot of authors I interview have either had books that they would never show anyone, or this is, you know, book number five or something. But for you to go book one off off the bat and write a book this good is, is very impressive.

JL: Well, thanks. It hurt that,

Mark: Yeah, I bet.

JL: as book two. I think Book two hurt more, but Book one was. Book two hurt for different reasons. It hurt because it was, it was like, uh, you know, just, it was like squeezing oil out of a, you just, you’re just, the pressure and stuff to make it just was much significantly different than the first one. The first one was just exciting and fun,

Mark: Yeah.

JL: but not knowing what you were doing was the part that was pressure. The pressure was on. You know,

Mark: Yeah. What’s your support network like at home when you’re trying to write this book? Do you have people that are reading it for you or is it [00:10:00] just people that are kind of like cheerleading to say you can do it? What’s that like for this book?

JL: I have some close friends who are good beta readers of these for me, as I, careful about what beta reading sections, but I had people that were willing to be honest with me about what they liked or didn’t like. I have a friend of mine who he probably crushes two thrillers a week easily, and so I was like turning to him like, does this fit? And in my first book, he, he said that it worked, but it could, he’s like, it was very much, it was different. It had its own voice. In both good ways and in bad ways because he was like, this doesn’t fit the traditional thriller. There’s a lot more character development than you would get, I think in a, a lot more show and less tell that you would get and sign of like, not to knock on a Clancy novel, but Clancy is, you don’t dig really deep into the characters in a Clancy novel.

You,

Mark: Yeah.

JL: some depth, but you don’t get a lot, and a little bit more tell and show because it’s focusing on the technology. You’re more interested in what the aircraft are doing and what the jet and what the ships are doing than you are. The characters are fun, but I was more

Mark: Yeah.

JL: Into that. So I had friends that, my close [00:11:00] friends would do that. I also had technical experts that from national laboratories and from industry that read a lot, and I would throw it back at them and I would say, is this working? And they would come back and say, uh, you got this part wrong. This measure was, measurement was incorrect. However, at the same time, they would say they, they would look at it technically and be like, this doesn’t, these two things don’t make sense. You’re adding in a dynamic here that wouldn’t work and as you’re writing, you don’t realize you’re doing. You just, you’re just writing what you think makes sense.

Mark: Yeah.

JL: And, it’s when you step back and can see the forest for the trees that you go, oh, I see that misstep. And then, then that happened after my editorial assessment. I ended up dumping like through, up dumping a lot of it and having to rewrite big sections. And I’m significantly happier with the way it played out. ’cause it was really bothering me the way that it was certain plot points that, my buddy was referring to it as the magic blood. it, it, it was, it was a, it, it, the magic, there was an element of blood in the story that, wasn’t well tied off and it was bothering me [00:12:00] and then several people said it didn’t work, and then suddenly it clicked.

And I, I dumped several chapters, got rid of certain characters and simplified it and suddenly it made way more sense. And it, that whole problem and that narrative went away completely.

Mark: How painful was that?

JL: Well, you know, I, I, the hard part is when, it, the. It’s hardest. I mean, that there’s a very famous Stephen King saying, you know, that you, don’t be afraid to kill your babies.

You know? So I, that was hard when you’re, when you’ve put a lot of effort into it and it’s a really good chapter and then you just completely dump it. But

Mark: Yeah.

JL: Had, that’s, it’s become so common now that at the time it was really hard because I wasn’t used to doing that. I wasn’t used to saying, I don’t need this chapter. I’m gonna get rid of it. And now I’m at the point where I’ll, like, in my current book, I wrote 30, 40 chapters and I recently just dumped 20 of ’em

Mark: Wow.

JL: That’s not gonna work. It, it won’t work. So I can’t be emotionally attached to it and be, and hold myself back by clinging to it for too long. It’s okay to completely [00:13:00] shift. ’cause in current book I’m writing, for example, it, I didn’t like the place where it was taking place.

Mark: Okay.

JL: And because I, I had a bad emotional connection with that setting, I knew it would come out in the writing. ’cause I can’t make a place I don’t like, seem magical or exciting to be in. Or an interesting place as a whole, unless I’m being extremely negative about it. But then I don’t want that to be the vibe of the story. I had to completely change the setting and dump it all because, and plot wise, it didn’t make sense for any of the characters to be in this other location that I moved it.

So I had to change everything. And that’s, as a reader, that that’s just the mature in the beginning, having to do that it was tough but after I had a professional editor come back and say, you gotta get rid of these things. You could do what you want, but this part doesn’t work. And they’d give me such great advice in the other parts of the book that it just made sense so I ended up dumping them and it worked out.

Mark: So do you plot or outline the book prior to writing it [00:14:00] or do you just go with it as you, as the ideas come, like you’re saying, playing do you just write it like a movie in order to have to cut that many chapters.

JL: The first book I outlined to an extent. I had a very strong idea of how it would end already.

Mark: Okay.

JL: the vision I have for the ending of the story. The second book started off with me trying to outline it, it, it wasn’t working. So I, I, it’s like if you’re asking me if I’m a, a pants or a plotter, I dunno, whatever term you want to use,

Mark: Yeah. Sorry.

JL: two where I have to create some structure, but I don’t know how it’s gonna get there and I just kind of go as it goes along.

Mark: Yeah.

JL: Um, I have found that it, I, I also can’t write quickly if I’m, there’s certain things that I probably should do that are better and I, I just want, I’m okay with giving myself grace with being patient with it if I want to enjoy the writing. to be honest, [00:15:00] most writers don’t make money doing this. I don’t.

Mark: Yeah.

JL: you do, if you’re doing it because you’re trying to make a lot of money, then you’re in the wrong industry. If you’re doing it because wanna write a good story, give yourself the grace of taking your time.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah, I would ask that because with the first draft, I always try and make the first draft as fun as possible and just write it and not worry too much about it. So I’ve never, I’ve, if I’ve cut chapters, I cut chapters. In revising, did you end up cutting chapters? It sounds like you cut chapters because it wasn’t working for you, so you were like quite a ways into the book and then just cut a whole chunk, almost like starting over.

JL: The only time it hurts is when I have a, what’s the best way to put it? The flow of the story and the way that it, it, feel, because I feel like there’s a rhythm in a good chapter. Like you could physically feel a good rhythm as the story goes along. Not to say that I’m, it, it, [00:16:00] it’s falling into an iic pentameter type, you know? Like it’s, but at the same time, you can tell when it’s off. flow isn’t right. It doesn’t hit right. I can physically feel it. It’s weird, but I physically can feel it when it’s not correct, and I don’t like it.

Mark: Okay.

JL: what’s hard is when I, I read a chapter and that rhythm is just right, and then I’ve gotta get rid of the chapter. And I’m like, can I take pieces of that and put it in a new chapter and have the same rhythm? I can’t, but I’ve gotta accept it, the fact that it’s not gonna be that way. Like I, I wrote another book that I ended up just dumping and not, I don’t know, it might come back up later on, but it was very, it was an emotional reaction, more or less, to a time that was going of our history and I felt that if I wrote it the way that it was right then, it would feel very trapped in that moment rather than kind

Mark: Okay.

JL: of a, a timeless writing. But there’s a couple chapters in there where I’m like, oh man, that is so good. it’ll never be read because it just, and I just have to accept the fact that I was just proud of the fact that I even wrote it to [00:17:00] begin with.

And that was it. That’s, that’s okay. I.

Mark: Yeah. So what research went into the Hawk Enigma, given your background and knowledge already?

JL: So I had lived in Japan before, but I’d never been to Tokyo. So I had to do a lot of physical mapping of that environment without having been there.

Mark: Okay.

JL: There’s some technological research, but that was, that was just something that I already, was just building off of things, something I already knew. I had to call, I called some people to physically interview to actually personally interview them to make sure that what I was doing was correct. Uh, sometimes I’ll, like, I’ll, I’ll reach out to people at National Laboratories or other individuals that I’ve worked with professionally in the past to say, does this chapter make sense? But the biggest one was getting the setting correct in a way that made sense for my story. I was at Voucher Con in New Orleans and I was on a panel. The other panelists were [00:18:00] adamant about not writing a story about a place you’ve never been to. And I said, well, my second book takes place on the Kazakhstan China border. I’m not physically gonna be able to go there. At the same time, I thought it was a very interesting story to write.

Mark: Yeah.

JL: how do I write a story with authenticity about a place that I can’t physically go to? And there’s certain levels at which, because they were asking, they said, well, what, how much does it take you outta the story if you’ve been to that place? And you know, the author’s getting it wrong. And I said, well, do, I said, by show of hands, who’s seen or likes the show Breaking Bad? And pretty much everybody raised their hand, you know, ’cause everybody’s, it’s a great show, right? I

Mark: Yeah.

JL: Up in Albuquerque. they will set things in their, in parts of the city that makes absolutely no sense, where they’re doing some of these deals. I’m like, dude, I. I know exactly where that is, and I would, that’s the last place I would do a drug deal or that would happen literally on the corner of this street. And so there I was like, does it take me out of the story? I [00:19:00] just kind of chuckled to myself and let it go because the

Mark: Yeah.

JL: good,

Mark: Yeah.

JL: good, it doesn’t matter. But I did have the chance to go, going back to the question about researching in Japan, I was able to go back to Japan for work a couple times this past year and I was pleasantly surprised at how relatively accurate searches allow and, and YouTube video allow you to be when understanding those environments. ‘Cause it was still, it was pretty accurate to what I thought it was gonna be. So I was pleasantly

Mark: Cool. Yeah. When you do re, when you like created Voodoo and his team, were there any moments where you adjusted the story to be more authentic to the reality in your experience because you have that background of knowing. There must be a line where you think, okay, I need this to happen for the plot. Even if it’s not plausible in, in a real life situation verse, but still be as,

JL: yeah, there were a couple situations where I combined two locations slash exercises or whatever into one thing because I needed the story to go [00:20:00] in that direction. Like there is a, there’s a section where they’re on a mountain in Utah, and there then they, they found a, a, a private range to do shooting. was me combining desert based land warfare with cold weather training. You would never go into a shooting environment on a mountain like that.

Mark: Hmm,

JL: real. However, for the plot, I had to combine the two.

Mark: okay.

JL: But individually they both were completely true. It’s just the environment changed. So when people read it, they’re like, why the heck would they be doing that?

And somebody who knows the community well will be like, that doesn’t make sense. But there’s a level of disbelief. Suspense and disbelief. ’cause one, I can’t be exactly accurate to the community ’cause I wanna protect the community. At the same time, the plot has to move at a certain speed. I can’t have you jumping from location to location to tell these little minuscule parts of a story when I can combine them into one fluid event.

Mark: Yeah.

JL: So that has to happen.

Mark: Okay. And the white [00:21:00] water rafting, was that something you have experienced before or was that all research? ’cause that felt really real as you were describing it. Okay.

JL: I was a river guide and I lived in, I didn’t

Mark: Okay.

JL: I didn’t use the same names, but there was, I used to live in an abandoned steakhouse called the, I forgot, I’m confusing between them. The, we called, it was called the, uh. Oh my gosh, I can’t remember the name of the real one. we landed an A Bandaid Steakhouse next to a Days Inn, and it was literally just wooden overhead in a big stake pit. And three of us lived in tents in there. And I’d wake up, walk across the street to the C if i’s on the trip for that day, running what was called the daily running Westwater, or running the cataract, running Cataract Canyon.

And if I wasn’t, I’d just grabbed my kayak and then I’d I’d go boating and all day long until my friends got back and then we’d go, then we’d go rock climbing. That was like my life for

Mark: Yeah. That’s awesome.

JL: Yeah, it was amazing. It went from that straight into bootcamp. So it was just, yeah, it was a huge shift.

Mark: Yeah, that would’ve been a huge shift for sure. Yeah.

JL: Yeah. So yeah, the rafting part is it definitely part of, uh, some people felt that I [00:22:00] shouldn’t have left it and I should have got rid of it, but I felt that it just gave, I thought it combined a good backstory and it, it tied in. I, I love it when stories feel like something is completely irrelevant and then it’s critical to the plot,

Mark: Yeah.

JL: but you’re just watching it play out and knowing it’s gonna pay off eventually.

Mark: Yeah.

JL: And I love that feeling when it finally pays off and you’re like, oh, oh. And then you realize there’s other things about the way that was playing out that, that you weren’t picking up on, and then it was all right in front of your face. I love that feeling.

Mark: Yeah,

JL: It’s like the, a lot of shows do that nowadays, and especially when they play with time. And so I wanted to incorporate that in the story somehow, which also made it more complicated than maybe it needed to be lesson learned, but it, it was still fun to put it in there.

Mark: It felt really authentic, which is, I think the difference between the fact that you had done it and experienced it before and the way he was doing it. And then I just [00:23:00] trusted that it was gonna pay off in the end, that it was all gonna come back together. Had it not come all, you know, full circle by the end, then it wouldn’t have been as good. ‘Cause it’s just like a plug. But it was, obviously it did. So it was, it was fun to read. I liked it.

JL: Good. Appreciate it.

Mark: The boot covers, where did you have. I love the book covers and it, I was, I was, it’s always interesting to think of when you have like military and you have ai, ’cause I have a book, I wrote a book sort of like that too. Not techno so much, but, uh, how you combine like the, the army with the tech to try and make it so that someone who’s looking at it will sort of know the genre or try to know the genre. ‘Cause it’s a tricky one. Did you come up with it? Or was that someone else For

JL: I had a different cover before that was done. Okay. And then I actually hired the guy that did Jack Cars covers

Mark: Oh, okay.

JL: and I collaborated and bounced some ideas. And then I got him some stock photos that I thought were interesting and then we just eventually [00:24:00] landed on this design. He did a lot of it, did a great job at it.

Mark: Yeah.

JL: So yeah, the, um, but at the end of the day, like I, I wanted it to feel, I wanted you to immediately know what you were getting yourself into. When you look at the book, you’re like, okay, it’s I, but at the same time, being careful about it, feeling overly military,

Mark: Yeah.

JL: That’s something that also people like, okay, I’m reading this ’cause it’s another Clancy novel. And then I’m, I’m delving into more post-traumatic stress. And my second book I get really into the dynamics of the team and how the wrong or right person will it, it just. It, it makes the mission what it is. that may not be what people are expecting sometimes in, in that book ’cause it’s, it gets kind of heavy.

And then at

Mark: Yeah.

JL: time it gets really goofy. ’cause I like, I like to balance humor

Mark: Yeah.

JL: with intensity. And it’s not that I run around shooting all the time. Like there’s, like, I almost like it when the shooting part isn’t as [00:25:00] intense as the internal struggles within the team.

Mark: Yeah,

JL: like there’s a chapter in the Hawk Enigma after this major event in Tokyo and they kind of feel like it’s, that all, all is lost kind of feeling in a moment. That chapter of them recognizing the weight of their problem to me was more fun to write than a lot of the action scenes. It just, I loved dealing with that because that’s reality. That’s more what you’re facing a lot of the time.

Mark: yeah. I like depth of character and that’s hard to find in this type of book because a lot of it is that Tom Clancy action stuff where you’re, the plot is Dr. Driving the story, not so much anything to do with the character, so,

JL: You get like a chapter in the beginning. He’s got a home life. Got it. Moving on.

Mark: yeah.

JL: then

Mark: Yeah, exactly.

JL: trying to knock on that genre. It’s like

Mark: No. Yeah,

JL: some people just want that. They just want, and so when they, they pick up my book and there’s a little, there’s like more meat to it. surprises them. Some [00:26:00] people love that and some people

Mark: yeah,

JL: be not, may not be their cup of tea. have a hard time when I pick up a book and it’s just a bunch of action, but the action doesn’t mean anything.

Mark: yeah.

JL: And so I’ve read several books where, like I’m I, IDNF, a lot of books just because I’m like, is this worth my time?

Mark: Hmm.

JL: And that’s not because, and I never write a review saying, I dnf this. That’s, I just think that’s a jerk move. Like, if you don’t like a book, you don’t like a book,

Mark: Yeah.

JL: If you like a book, let everybody know. If you don’t, then don’t. But there’s probably books that I’ve read where they jump right into the action without giving me any stakes. And, and then every time they have action, they’re very similar. And I never wanted to go through a, another same, an action sequence where I felt the stakes were even remotely the same or the, or the intensity was the same. There’s different layers to it. So, and every single time you have a combat evolution, you have to learn something about your character and, and recognizing that the action has to show something [00:27:00] or lead to something, it makes the story significantly better.

Mark: yeah,

JL: you’ve watched a movie where there’s been action that does, that, you find yourself connected to it in a different way.

Mark: yeah.

JL: And that’s, that’s what I was going for.

Mark: You had so as something as simple as Stu Bear, which was hilarious at the same time, brought a lot of realism and likability to that character just by calling him Stu Bear. And that’s not something you would really see necessarily in an action book like that, which, just a nickname like that. But it was, it was perfect because it brought him, made it so real.

Yeah.

JL: Yeah. That’s also, that’s reality though. I mean, you go into a team, they have stupid nicknames for each other they, um, or somebody made something up and then it won’t let go. And then it just, I mean, that’s the same thing with any real call sign. ’cause it’s the same thing with pilots. Pilots don’t name themselves. Somebody names them that because something happened.

Mark: Yeah.

JL: And sometimes it’s a cool name. Most of the time it’s stupid, you know? So,

Mark: Yeah,

JL: They, they don’t wanna be completely insulting. But it, it’s the same kind of thing, [00:28:00] like the, um, I wanted to not go crazy with the cool guy nicknames, you know, but at the same time just it’s, it’s reality. So Stew Bear was a funny one.

Mark: yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, obviously Voodoo is the main character, so that he also had a, I liked the backstory in that with, with how you also plugged all that in there and why he was voodoo, and I won’t talk about the reveal. Of course. Then don’t I spoil it yet? We’ll talk about that after.

Riding the villain. Which was it? I, I don’t know the pronunciation. I would, I just thought I said ru in my head, but I don’t know if that’s how you, he’s essentially the main villain of this story, who we meet. Uh, in that respect, were you trying to write someone who we felt somewhat empathetic for, or almost like his own mission, trying to understand his mission and his goal within it?

JL: Yeah. So with the, without giving spoilers away of the background of and in Japanese, his name is pronounced Yu. [00:29:00] It’s

Mark: Okay.

JL: a Japanese R is like an LNNR kind of mix. So dew is how you pronounce it. But Dew is he, what I wanted out of the villain wasn’t just, once again, he can’t be moti. I, I, I like Dan Brown’s perspective on this.

Dan Brown and his masterclass talks about villains and how motivating them with greed just kind of two dimensional and empty, right? motivat, but also motivating it by just, just vengeance is another one that doesn’t make sense because it’s limited in what it is. So I, I wanted him to you to see him as he has facets to how he is taking advantage of situations, but there is motive behind every single one of them that you aren’t expecting.

Mark: Mm-hmm.

JL: By default, you look at it and say, oh, he’s this, he’s just a bad dude who wants this particular thing. He’s doing this for money. And then you look under it and he is like, oh, oh, he is doing it for power. And you look under it and he’s like, oh, oh, he is doing this for something else.[00:30:00]

Mark: Yeah.

JL: And then that point in time, you’re, you’re never conflicted. You know who the bad guy is all the time, but there’s a moment, I want you to have a moment where you empathize with him, where you’re like, what if we told this story from his perspective? Would voodoo be a villain?

Mark: Yeah.

JL: know, would it, there’s a po I want that to be a possibility and not one that you would think of because I, your perspective at a story immediately assumes the protagonist is the one that you’re telling the story from. And that’s, I want you to question that. Now, it may not, may not have succeeded and gone far enough, but at the same time, it gave, helped me thinking that way, helped me give better perspective. Also, if you go back to the original motivation of that character and where they’re from and how they ended up there a lot of things led to that.

Mark: Mm-hmm.

JL: they think. I’m sorry, I’m being really vague about

Mark: Yeah. Yeah. For the spoilers. Yeah. Yeah,

JL: but where he’s from really drives his motivation and his loyalties

Mark: yeah.

JL: and then what happened because of that. And then you [00:31:00] also realize what he was told versus reality versus all these other things have led him to this point where he himself may or may not be manipulated by the situation.

Mark: Hmm.

JL: this, that’s tragic and it’s tragic. He ended up where he was

Mark: Yeah.

JL: and so, and what the decisions that he has to make. And so that, that’s what I wanted outta that character. I didn’t want him to just be like, the villain.

Mark: Did you ride him that way from the beginning or did he, did you flush him out after?

JL: Yes and no. In the very beginning, I actually had a hard time with him because I wanted him to be one thing and I knew he’d be something else. But articulating that is what took more time to

Mark: Okay. Yeah. A question from Wesley Smith, who is our last guest on the show. We have a, a pay it Forward with the guest questions. He wants to know what is your writing?

JL: So I try to, when I’m in a good rhythm, I try to put down [00:32:00] something every day. But I don’t, I used to be real hard on myself. Like, if you’re not putting down this many words every day, then you’re, you’re wasting your time or beating myself up. I have too many goals in my life to beat myself up for not beating those, like, am I playing an instrument enough?

Am I working out enough? Am I writing enough? Am I, am I studying enough for my day job? Am I, am I paying enough attention to my kids? Am I paying enough? So all those things are just gonna rack on your head at all times.

Mark: Yeah.

JL: Has to be a release for me. It can’t be yet another box I need to check for the day. So I do one of two things. I put my, I give myself a realistic limit of what I’m trying to, uh, get out of the writing for that week. I try to sit down and commit myself to writing, not just when I’m inspired, but when I’m not inspired as well, and getting a routine of writing something. what I’ve noticed with a lot of my books is inspiration strikes in places that I’m not expecting. So I’m always open to that strike of, of [00:33:00] inspiration. So I use Scrivener on my phone, syncs with my computer through Dropbox. And so if I’m talking to someone, watching something, reading something, anytime I get inspiration, I open Scrivener, I write down my thoughts immediately right then and there.

Mark: Okay.

JL: And then when it’s time for me to write, I go back to that note section and I say, okay, what were the things that were going from there? And I have like thousands of different things that I’ve come across throughout the day, or like an Instagram post that said something that I was like, it was witty in a way that I liked a lot, but I wanted to tweak it to make it work in my book. I would write those things down and then I’d start from there, like saying, okay, where am I at my plot? What’s the story? Can I incorporate one of these things into it? And then sometimes just as a writing exercise, I’ll force myself to figure out a way to get that to fit in, and then that inspires other things. I use prompts a lot too, where, I don’t use AI to write anything that I write. However, I like to use AI to sanity check whether or not I’m going in a good direction. And the way I do that is if I know [00:34:00] AI already has models of expectations in writing, I will write in, Hey, this is gonna happen in this story. What should I expect to have happen next? And then AI gives me its recommendations, and I do none of those. Because it’s modeled off of other writing, and

Mark: Yeah.

JL: And so that speeds up my normal process where I’ll write something and be like, are they expecting that James Patterson says if you write three potential answers and use the third one, because people have already thought of the other two, well now we have GPT to say, what are those other three things?

And then you just ask it for it, it gives ’em to you and you go, great, moving on. Not using those. Sometimes I don’t have those problems. But being open to using tools to do things some authors are just purists and they’re like, I don’t wanna touch any of that stuff. I think you’re losing the resource. You talk to people to give their opinion. Using AI to ask for its opinion on something is, there’s nothing wrong with that, as

Mark: Yeah.

JL: as a, as a writing purist, as long as it’s not doing the writing for you.

Mark: Yeah,

JL: and so you’re still, you’re just bouncing ideas off of somebody. It’s just another, somebody.

Mark: yeah, yeah, for sure. [00:35:00] How do you know when you’re forcing yourself to write? Because it should be part of your routine and maybe forcing is the wrong word, versus you. You need to write.

JL: That’s one of those things kinda like, it’s kinda like when, you know you’re supposed to go to the gym to lift weights when you don’t want to be in the gym. You just, you gotta do it. Right. And sometimes just the forcing function, sometimes I’ll just, it, there are lots of times that I don’t feel like writing because I’m not feeling the inspiration or I’m not, I’m not excited about what’s coming out. Or sometimes my just my hands hurt.

Mark: Yeah.

JL: All kinds of random things, you know? So I, me there’s a mixture of, there’s a difference between the difference between discipline and habit. Discipline is you’re doing it even when it’s hard, right? It’s, it’s, it’s keeping to those things. have a hard time with writing because it is a [00:36:00] creative outlet, and then forcing myself on timelines with a creative outlet almost counterintuitive. And so some people, if you’re a writer, you’re trying to meet a deadline gotta work through it it’s a matter of setting aside time and saying, I’m gonna set aside these four hours to do this writing, and then just write. Sometimes I’ll, instead of writing, I’ll just go back and I’ll reread other chapters and just slowly edit those. However, that becomes the default then where you’ve just reread

Mark: Mm-hmm.

JL: like 14 times haven’t read anything

Mark: Yeah.

JL: you feel stuck.

Mark: Yeah.

JL: So once again, that becomes a crutch. So it’s a balance between feeling inspired feeling in the, in the note, but finding ways to prompt yourself. To do new things. Sometimes just as an exercise, I’ll have a chapter and I’ll say, what if I wrote this? Uh, I like to, I like to write chapters from the perspective of the person most vulnerable in that chapter. And so that person usually has the best perspective of what’s, of what’s happening in that scene. But, [00:37:00] but I also find that I can’t do that all the time because then you’re confusing who the main character of the book is.

Mark: Yeah.

JL: main character? My main character is my main character. I gotta follow them more than other people, and I gotta balance that out. So if I’ve written it from somebody else’s perspective, just as an exercise, I’ll be like, okay, I’m gotta write it from someone else’s and just see what happens.

Mark: Mm-hmm.

JL: Or I’m gonna follow them leading up to this moment and see if that gives me something different. And a lot of times I’ll find that I’ve discovered a different avenue, a vehicle in the story that I want to execute.

Mark: Yeah, I was thinking about when you were talking about the check boxes and you’re like, you know, I, I, am I spending enough time with my kids? Am I, doing enough of this? Am I doing, dedicated enough to work and all this research? And I think when you say you’re trying to balance that with writing, that’s what stuck in my head because I was, I, I always struggle with that when I sit down to write and it’s like, should I be writing right now or should I be spending more time with my son or should I be, doing this or doing that? But if you have, always have those excuses, you never end up writing.

JL: Committing yourself to a certain period of time every day. And that, that’s the [00:38:00] other thing about having a schedule is if you say, I’m gonna do it during this period of time, and everyone else has agreed that that’s an okay time for me to do it, then you’ve, you’ve worked through that. That’s why a

Mark: Okay. I see.

JL: that write, they wake up really early in the morning to write,

Mark: Yeah.

JL: I can’t do that. I just can’t. I travel a lot. And so what makes it nice is I write, when I travel,

Mark: Okay.

JL: I don’t feel guilty about writing when I’m on the plane ’cause I’m just on the plane

Mark: Yeah.

JL: or in my hotel room. And so that makes it easier.

Mark: Okay. That makes sense. What advice would you give someone who just published their first or second book?

JL: Your first book. So every author’s first book is their baby and they’re, they’re proud of it and they’re scared of it to being let it go into the world. And they want all these magical things to happen for it. And they’re gonna learn that reality is a different thing. They’re gonna check their reviews on a daily, on a, on an hourly basis to see if another one came in. They’re gonna be sad when they don’t [00:39:00] arrive, or they’ll get some random momentum and then suddenly it’ll stop and they don’t know what they did. And then they’ll be chasing after all of these marketing options and then they’re gonna be inundated in their email from random people that aren’t real from Gmail accounts that don’t exist. So. The writing world, world stepping into. Is you’re, you’re, you’re opening yourself up to an entirely different market and business situation. But you as an author, don’t think about those things when you’re writing the story. So my recommendation is you recognize the fact that you’ve started another business. You want that business to succeed. You wanna be effective at it. remember why you initially did it. Did you do it because you wanted your books to sell so you could become an author? Or did you write the book because you felt the book needed to be written? Usually it’s a combination of those things.

You don’t write a book ’cause you don’t want any, want. No one to read it. Nobody does that. However, also like balancing that with why you want the reviews [00:40:00] and why you want the sales, you want those because you wanna feel successful in something that you love. And so, but you can love it with or without the success. And if you can find, you’re gonna find after the first book that.

When you’ve associated the, or rather disassociated your desire for success your desire to write, and you can find a balance between those two things, you’ll suddenly find that the, the reviews and those other things only matter really when you release the book at first. And then as you go in between books, you care less and you’re, you find more peace with writing again. But that initial release of whatever book, indie published or traditional is going to be a flurry of emotions. And some of that’s gonna be a mixture of imposter syndrome, a mixture of why not me? Very few of us become that 0.1% that becomes dramatically successful. And, [00:41:00] and so in light of the fact that you most likely will feel this crippling failure of becoming an author, you’re gonna realize why you actually wrote the book to begin with, and that you will find an audience as long as you keep pushing, and so that, that is really, as a, as a new author, you’ve gotta realize once returning back to why you write, and that has to be enough. It has to, otherwise you won’t.

Mark: Yeah, that was great advice. Thank you. Thank you for being so frank with that too. It is a very challenging process and yeah, there’s not a lot of that. It’s 1% for a reason, so Yeah.

JL: It’s soul crushing and, and like, dang it. I forgot it was another masterclass, but it was a great one about screenwriting and it was like, there’s four types of books. There’s good books that sell, there’s bad books that sell, good books that don’t sell, and there’s bad books that don’t sell. really two categories in there. You wanna be in. And the goal is just to figure out, just to get into those two.

Mark: Yeah.

JL: I, I, I would not

Mark: That’s great.[00:42:00]

JL: book that sells really well and be famous for having, being a terrible writer. I’d rather

Mark: Yeah.

JL: with having written good books that don’t, people haven’t found yet.

Mark: Yeah, that’s, I love that. Yeah. Thank you. Where can listeners find your books?

JL: So my book Audio Wise is available pretty much everywhere. So whether it be Spotify or any major audiobook, audible, anywhere like that, narrator is Kirby Hayburn. I will be honest and say that Kirby is an incredible narrator. Is he the best narrator for a military techno thriller? I don’t know.

However, he was the narrator for Gone Girl, and he has done a bunch of other great books. He’s an incredible actor, and he’s a, he’s a great narrator. And so I think he did, he did a really good job. Is he like a, uh, Scott Brick or a, some of the other ones? No, but he also doesn’t cost a stupid amount. So he was, he was the perfect, happy medium for me, a well-known name, good voice actor, and he told the story well enough to [00:43:00] where I was happy with what came out of it. And so you can find him. You can, I, I wanted to make sure that you could find my book pretty much anywhere that audio books are sold.

Mark: Nice.

JL: Yeah.

Mark: All right. Well, thank you so much. We are gonna now dive into a couple extra questions. The spoiler full section. So if you do not want to know the answer to what happens at the end of the book, for listeners listening to this right now, you can pause the episode and come back after you have read the book.

So that is your spoiler warning. So, question, when you wrote the end, did you envision that it was gonna happen that way in the end, how it was gonna wrap up?

JL: So yes and no. I had a picture of. A ball of light and someone standing in a ball of light. Don’t know why I was fixated on that, but I loved the idea of just this big old ball of light. And it was actually a real world thing. My buddy and I were gonna build. We started researching it and we could, the thing that we called the white dwarf [00:44:00] at the end of the story, like we did the math on that, that would work. So I wanted to have that scene. it was all about getting to that scene, getting to a scene where there’s this massive ball of light. And I was like, well, how would that work? How would that make sense? How would they get there? And then I had to work backwards of what Intel would lead them to that point. Why was the God algorithm relevant? And then I was like, well, how is Voodoo the linchpin? Then I was like, oh, well Voodoo’s gonna discover how he’s relevant to this story at the same time as he figures out what he needs to do. And those two things have to come in the fact that he has to confront his darkest fear. So. that whole aspect of him those moments in his dreams is actually a, a, a treatment part that ties back with post-traumatic stress where people get stuck in a moment and they can’t get past it. And they have to things like take, MDMA or some other type of psychedelic drug so that they don’t have the emotional trauma associated with reliving experience so they can complete the experiences.

So their brain [00:45:00] is no longer trapped in a loop. Voodoo was trapped in a loop and something had to break him through. And so the actual God algorithm, the very thing that was, they were manipulating the entire time was the thing that had, he needed to get through it. had to confront his problem head on, which is what he was doing.

The entire book. Entire book. He’s avoiding his problem. He’s, he’s running away from it. And so now he has to run headlong into it, but he doesn’t realize he’s running straight into his past as he is doing the entire time. So I needed those things all happened and somehow get to a ball of light. So

Mark: Yeah.

JL: that’s why I wrote it that way.

Mark: Okay.

JL: the part that surprised me was what happens with the villain after that scene. That was what I had not anticipated when I started riding it. That kind of just was a happy accident. ’cause I was like, I’ve gotta have some better with this dude.

Mark: Okay.

In the next book, does the, I guess I’m kind of, this is almost a forward thinking question, but the, the girls that died as a [00:46:00] result of him making that decision when he knew, well, I guess he kind of didn’t, he didn’t really know what the impact was gonna be when he, when he killed the

JL: Taro the guy that he hit with the, the,

Mark: Yeah, the sniper.

JL: battery bomb. Yeah.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So he didn’t know what the repercussions of that would be, but they were, they were quite intense and sad. And that was a big emotional moment.

JL: Mm-hmm.

Mark: Is that something that is gonna haunt him in the future.

JL: That specific incident? No, but his past doesn’t leave him. So he has, I mean, it just gets compounded with other things that he’s gotta deal with, you know? So the sad part is when you’ve experience, when you’re not, that is like coupled with the, the, the kid in his in his memory is way worse than what those happened with those girls.

Mark: Yeah.

JL: never saw the girls. He just knew what happened to

Mark: Yeah.

JL: Right? So the kid is the one that has been constantly messing with his

Mark: Mm-hmm.

JL: because he doesn’t forgive himself for [00:47:00] doing that. And if you notice in the book, the only time Voodoo actually pulls the trigger on a gun is when he accidentally kills someone.

Mark: Yeah. Okay.

JL: other time in the book. ’cause that’s not his job. That’s

Mark: Yeah.

JL: and Stew’s job.

Mark: Yeah.

JL: And so there’s, he uses other things to get his job done, but it’s the reader will never pick up on the fact that Voodoo never actually shoots a gun,

Mark: No, I didn’t think of it. Yeah.

JL: Yeah.

Mark: Did you ever think about killing one of the main characters? I thought one of the main characters was gonna die. I thought Stu was gonna die or Fresco.

JL: Yeah. You always do. But then you realize that if you’re writing more books, this kind of a, it’s kind of unforgivable, you know, when you do

Mark: Okay.

JL: you gotta, I gotta make you really love him and then kill him.

Mark: Okay. Okay. That’s fair.

JL: Martin does. He’s like, oh, you love this

Mark: Yeah.

JL: here. Watch. I’m gonna kill all of ’em at once.

Mark: Yeah.

JL: But like, it also, it, it, it [00:48:00] gotta make sure it fits the genre, some genres that doesn’t make sense. And this is kind of one of those genres where me killing all the main, like really good characters that you’ve created. Like, it doesn’t make sense in, in the first book. I can do it later. So readers don’t be surprised if that happens later. But

Mark: Yeah.

JL: When they, when you get into the spear and the sentinel, you know, so that one may something, other things may happen in book two, but the yeah, that, that, it’s a debate for every, every so it’s, it’s kind of like killing dogs. You don’t wanna do it, you know, it’s

Mark: Yeah.

JL: So, but I wrote it in like in my first book I put that in there because that was reality. When we went on target in Iraq, there were these wild dogs that would come at you. And we always had somebody with a silencer on their gun that would shoot ’em.

Mark: Wow.

JL: It was horrible. But it’s just like, you’re trying to, like some of these people that we were going after were just horrible people. If we were gonna capture them, we had to sneak [00:49:00] up on ’em. We couldn’t have this early warning system of dogs everywhere barking and screaming at us. These are some gross dogs. It’s like they didn’t even look like dogs anymore. I’m not happy about the fact that that was one of the guys would do that, but I’m trying to paint a real picture, and so there’s certain things I don’t do in the book, and then there’s some things I’m just like, I, I had to, I couldn’t cut all of ’em out because then I’m, I’m writing a PG book about Navy Seals, which is boring.

Mark: Yeah.

JL: Yeah,

Mark: Yeah. I mean it’s interesting when you get into gun fights like that and in the end that ’cause that, which is why, I mean, anything goes right that’s the whole point. But you must try to avoid like a John Wick moment where it seems like everybody’s shooting at your characters and nobody’s hitting anybody, but they’re all professional soldiers.

JL: right. There’s a certain level of realism that doesn’t make any sense when you’re, if you have a John Wick moment. I couldn’t. Yeah, no, the characters are gonna get messed up. Like that’s what happens in war especially. [00:50:00] I mean, in my first book they get particularly messed up in the beginning, you know, because of what the, especially in the, in the, in the, in his dreams, you know? ‘Cause that’s a memory. In

Mark: Yeah.

JL: They’re getting super screwed up.

Mark: Yeah.

JL: They, I mean they all get screwed up I think kind of towards the end. But the, in my second book it, I take it at a completely different angle. It’s funny ’cause some, a friend of mine was reading the second book and they’re like, how did this part happen and they didn’t get hurt. And then they finish the book and they’re like, oh, okay. I take everything back.

Mark: Okay.

JL: I was like, yeah, at a certain point they’ve gotta get messed up. That’s just reality. But also

Mark: Yeah.

JL: have ’em get messed up and then heal too quickly and you gotta figure out these plot

Mark: Yeah.

JL: But you’d be amazed at how many firefights my friends have gotten in and they didn’t get a scratch on ’em because of how incompetent their enemy was.

Mark: Okay. Oh, that’s good to know.

JL: It’s hard to shoot people. Yeah.

Mark: That’s an interesting fact. You wouldn’t know unless you were actually in it. Yeah.

JL: No, there’s, some of my friends came back from stuff and I was like, dude, y’all should be dead. Every single one of you. I don’t not understand how that happened. And then there are other cases where [00:51:00] simple stuff like the one case where a really close friend of mine got killed and he was the only casualty in the entire combat. And everybody looks back and they’re like, we don’t know how this happened. It was just,

Mark: Wow.

JL: He got hit with a round from a distance that didn’t make any sense, it got him right in the head, you know? And then that was it. So it, it, anyway, so that’s, you wanna, you wanna tie some of that realism in there, at the same time not overwhelm the reader with too much.

Mark: Yeah. Okay. Wow. Did you have to end this on a lighter note now? Is it the dead hooker metaphor that you have to read the book to kinda understand where, where that comes from? Did you make that up or is that something that Okay. I assumed it was, ’cause it sounds very, very military brotherhood, but

JL: yeah.

Mark: I had to ask.

JL: was always the joke. I’d bury a dead hooker for that guy.

Mark: Yeah.

JL: And so I wanted to add that in there as like a dead hooker moment. And then I flip it on its head in the second [00:52:00] book.

Mark: Okay.

JL: Yeah. I use it again. But you’re like, and then when you hear it the second time, you’re like, Ugh, I don’t like that now, in the first part, it’s like kind of just a crude way of explaining something and the second time you’re like, I don’t, that’s messed up.

Mark: Yeah.

JL: because, not because the analogy is crude, but because the way that it’s being thrown back out.

Mark: Yeah.

JL: You’re like, dude, you’re, you’re missing the spirit of that statement. Not that that’s spirit of that statement was any good to begin with, but it, yeah. Anyway,

Mark: Okay.

JL: which was my point. I wanted to

Mark: Yeah.

JL: for you to, as a reader, to come back and be like, have mixed feelings about it. Yeah.

Mark: Yeah, yeah. Well, thank you so much. This has been awesome. I really appreciate you taking the time.

JL: Thank you. It’s good.

Mark: If you don’t mind we have, if you can have a couple more minutes for the after show, we will when we wrap up here and we’ll get right into that for our Patreon members.

JL: Okay.

Mark: Thank you.

JL: Thank you.

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.