A name change, and a new query

The query below is something I wrote this afternoon. It represents, I believe, the fourth or fifth iteration of the query for my second novel, previously titled, EMPTY SPACES, and now retitled, RUNNING ON EMPTY.

At least, it will be titled that until I change my mind again. I'm fickle. What can I say?

Anyhoo.... The query is rough and not yet polished. But I thought I would toss it up here to get some early feedback. Let me know what you think, although as always please try to be nice. And if you can't be nice, at least be specific.

And also, as always, thank you!


Here goes:


Dear agent,

Grant Bachman is an ordinary junior college teacher, the kind of guy who says “excuse me” when he sneezes alone. When an armed student opens fire on an otherwise gorgeous New England morning, Grant is forced to use a fellow teacher’s desk-drawer pistol to stop him.

Once the smoke clears, Grant assumes the worst is over. He’s wrong.

Over the next five days Grant encounters an assortment of characters, all of whom will alter his life’s trajectory. Among them are a beguiling lost girl with the morals of a feral cat, a therapist offering the sweet hope of a restored life, his own self-absorbed wife whose affair with a roguish young cop is reaching critical mass, a pack of reporters hungry for a hero to tear apart, and a straight-arrow police sergeant hell-bent on solving an unspeakable crime.

When Grant’s estranged wife finds the school shooter’s cell phone hidden in her husband’s car and turns it over to her crazy boyfriend, the finger of blame turns toward Grant Bachman. With his lost girl tagging along, Grant finds himself on the run from the police, his wife, his therapist, and his old life. Now he must find the truth before his pursuers find him.

My novel, RUNNING ON EMPTY, is a fast-paced suspense/thriller complete at 91,000 words.

As a newspaper reporter, columnist, and editor, I’ve received more than a dozen national, regional, and state awards from the Associated Press and the Illinois Press Association for writing and reporting.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Empty Spaces is done!

I finished my second novel Thursday night. It clocks in at a sleek 90k and should fall in the suspense/thriller category. At least, I think it does. Genre identification has never been my strong suit.

I have a couple of people who have already generously offered to beta read it, but if there's anyone out there who would like a good laugh, er, read, let me know and I'll ship it to you. Just shoot me an email at terry.towery@gmail.com.

It's edgy and R-rated in spots (as was the first one, despite it's Christian themes). There's no religion in this one, if that kind of stuff turns you off. But there IS lots of violence, so beware.

Anyway, let me know. For now, preseason football is calling my name.

I'm a whore

Okay, before anyone gets all up my grill for the title of this post, I'd like you to know that the word "whore" appears in the Christian bible 59 times!

Okay. I just made that up. I really have no idea how many times the word appears, but I know it does. A lot.

So anyway, about that "I'm a whore" thing.

Most of you know I wrote a novel, called The Devil You Don't Know. It's pretty good, I've been told. It took me three years to write and revise it. Three complete revisions, actually. It's been professionally edited. Not once, but twice.

It has garnered attention from some of the top literary agents in New York, two of whom told me I was among the best debut writers they had stumbled across. The managing editor of Writer's Digest Magazine critiqued the manuscript and pronounced it one the best he'd read. I've had requests from agents, but no offers.

I don't say these things to brag. These are facts.

I am almost done with my second novel, which I believe is exponentially better than the first. It's certainly more commercially viable.

And therein lies the problem with TDYDK.

It's a pseudo-Christian/mainstream thriller. It doesn't preach (much). It has very adult themes, including rape, pornography, alcoholism and promiscuity. See, what I wanted to do was rewrite the Bible the way Stephen King rewrote Stoker's Dracula.

I wondered what would happen if the Bible IS true. And what would happen if things predicted in the Bible started to happen today? In this secular world. To real people, not cardboard cutouts from poorly written Christian novels.

You know, it sounded like one hell of an idea back in college, when I thought of it after a long night of booze and dope.

And it turned out to be a damned good story. One person who read it said it reminded them of a weird cross between Stephen King and Saint Paul. I took it as a compliment.

Sadly there is no market for such a hybrid in today's fiction market, I have been told. I wish I had a dollar for every agent and/or person in the business who has told me privately that they loved it, but just knew in their heart that they couldn't sell it because of its "Christian stuff."

To which I say: Bullshit.

Has anyone ever read King's The Stand? That book has more religious imagery in it than mine does. Really. I mean, if you sub the name God for Mother Abigail and the name Satan for Randall Flagg, you have The Book of Revelations. Classic Good versus Evil.

I don't recall that causing any sales problems for Mr. King. Do you?

All of which brings me to my point (and yes, I can hear your sigh of relief out there!).

You see, I'm sitting on TDYDK. It's gathering electronic dust on my computer -- still edited, sleek and ready to be read and enjoyed.

So. Do I leave it there and call it a practice book?

Do I start another round of queries (I've sent 29 so far; most were unanswered)?

Or do I find a way to publish the damned thing myself?

For some reason self-publishing (or e-publishing, or Indie publishing. Are they all the same? Hell, I don't even know) scares me to death. For several reasons.

1. It looks like a lot of work.

2. It requires me to do all the PR work. I don't HAVE that many friends and I hate to pimp myself on Twitter and Facebook (although I will if I have to. See the title of this post).

3. I don't want to screw up any chance I have to traditionally publish the new book, or any future books.

Because as much as I love writing fiction, I also want to make money at it. There. I said it. I am a literary whore. I don't do this for the hell of it. I do it because I believe I have something to say, and because I want people to read what I write. And pay for it.

I write this with no apologies. I mean, you CAN be an artist and make money at it. Just ask JK Rowling. Or Stephen King. Or Amanda Hocking. Or (cringe) Dan Brown.

I'm not saying I'm in their league (well, except for .... oh never mind). You get my point.

So I'm writing this to get your opinions. I know they will be all over the place. I know that some have tested the self-pub waters and found them to their liking. Others, I suspect, have the same fears I have.

So if you were me, what would you do?

Epic writing week

Well, I found my mojo.

How, you ask? I merely rolled up my sleeves and started writing. And I didn't quit until my eyes glazed over.

Each day this week. Without fail. I didn't blog. I didn't read blogs. I stayed off Facebook and Twitter. I even managed to (mostly) avoid my baseball PS3 game. Oh, and even real baseball, except for night games.

Yesterday, for instance, I sat down to write a particularly big scene in Empty Spaces, one I had been looking forward to writing for quite some time. I had no idea how long it would be, I only knew I wanted to finish it in one sitting.

I did.

And it was 3,500 words long. I know that's a piece of cake for some writers to knock off in a day, but I tend to agonize over each and ever sentence -- even going back and rewriting after only a couple of paragraphs. So, it was a pretty big deal for me.

All told, I wrote a bit less than 10k words this week, bringing the manuscript up to 26k. Still a ways to go, sure, but I'm back into the story and it's starting to well up inside of me, like The Devil You Don't Know did when I was writing it every day.

I'm still a bit down, since I've heard nothing from any agents except one since the Writer's Digest conference in late January. That means I still have two partials and a full out, not to mention more than 20 queries. Some of the queries are several months old now, so I'm assuming a no on them. But many are less than a couple months old, so there's still hope.

And no, I haven't pulled the trigger on self-publishing yet. I'm not sure I ever will, to be honest. But I think it's wise to keep it as a fall-back right now for TDYDK.

I'm really sorry I've been absent on the Internets recently. I promise to post more here and hit all of your awesome blogs. Honestly. It just seemed important to me that I somehow climb back into the writing saddle and start riding again.

And, thank God, I did.

How was your writing week?

A tale of two scenes

My 20-year-old son, Zach, is not a person who reads a lot for pleasure. He's very intelligent, but in a spacial way. He wants to be a film editor. Or an engineer. Something spacial. Visual.

But he asked to read the opening of my novel-in-progress, Empty Spaces, the other night. The book, you might remember, opens with a harrowing school shooting -- the inciting incident that fuels the entire novel.

I was rather proud of my opening scene, which I have posted here on this blog previously.

So he read it and when he was done, he turned to me and said: "Hmmm. I think you could do it better."

Say what?

My initial reaction was the usual. What do you know? You're just a kid, and you don't even read much. Give me a break. But I didn't say it. Instead, I was curious. I mean, I've learned over the years that sometimes, something really good comes from some rather surprising places.

So I listened. And listened. He talked about how I was "telling it, not showing it." Remember, this is a kid who knows next to nothing about writing fiction. He asked me my favorite scene ever in a movie.

I thought for a while and said, "The scene in the Godfather where Michael gets the gun from behind the old-fashioned toilet stall and goes out and shoots the gangster and a police captain."

"Right," he said. "That's my favorite, too. Think about how the filmmaker did that, how he used the tension and sounds and camera angles to jack up the tension without saying a word."

So I thought about it. And we talked about it. For more than an hour. And when I went to bed that night, I promised him I would re-work the opening scene the next morning, using his suggestions.

I didn't have much hope that it would be better. After all, I'm the writer here, the expert.

But I got up, poured me a cup of Starbucks (it was an off day from the gym) and went to work. I opened up a new Word file and, without reading the original, re-imagined the scene from scratch. I wanted to show it as though we were looking at it, feeling it, hearing it, smelling it. I wanted the tension to come organically, and not just through my words.

What follows is the original opening scene, followed by the re-imagined one. You be the judge. And remember that the scene shows an anonymous kid preparing to shoot up his junior college. The scene really sets up the entire novel.

Original scene:

The boy dropped his backpack onto the floor just outside the stall closest to the window and plucked the Heckler-Koch G36 mini assault rifle from its hiding place between his American history book and a pair of balled-up sweatpants. The gun was wrapped in a pair of socks—the good black ones his mother had bought him last Christmas.

He’d done his homework. The weapon was assembled in less than ten seconds, since the G36 simply snaps together using its handy little cross-pins—typically effective German engineering, his father would’ve said. The boy had bought it three days earlier from some jive-talking dope dealer whose hands shook so much he could barely pocket the cash. It had been no problem coming up with the money. He’d simply withdrawn it from his savings account at the First Bank of Exeter—money he’d earned over the summer working in his father’s law office. He’d been little more than a glorified delivery boy, of course, but it had made the Old Man happy to have his kid hanging around. And he paid well.

Once the weapon was together, he rummaged in the backpack until he found the three ammo clips, pulled them out and slammed one home. He no longer felt the need to hurry. If someone came in now, he’d just start here. He stood, shouldered the backpack, tucked the remaining clips into the waistband of his jeans and wiped his sweaty hair from his eyes. He could feel his heart pounding in his temples. He felt more alive than he had ever felt in his life.

He looked at himself briefly in the big mirror. A wild-eyed stranger stared back at him. Averting his eyes, he walked out of the bathroom and into the crowded, noisy hallway.

Here's the new scene:


He shrugged out of the black canvas backpack and let it drop. It smacked the floor, sending up a fine spray of gritty dust. He bent down and grimaced. An unmistakable odor seeped in under the closed stall door—sweet urinal cakes, stale piss, icy disinfectant. The candy scent of cheap liquid hand soap.

Jesus. Was there a place on earth more fucking disgusting than a school bathroom?

He tore at the backpack’s zipper, which hesitated only a second before giving way. Zzzzip. Hands plunged inside, rummaged about. His brain took note of what he felt. A notebook. A flannel shirt, rolled into a ball. An iPod. Cell phone. Earbuds. A sneaker. His father’s ice pick. Just in case. Dad wouldn’t need it.

His hand grasped something cold—solid. He grunted, pulled it out.

An American History textbook. He pegged it at the door. Blam.

Growing frantic, he dug deeper, tossing the contents aside.

Yes. He grasped cold metal with trembling hands. The receiver housing of the Heckler-Koch G36 mini assault rifle, as black as midnight. It paid to know the right people. He knew the right people.

He placed the housing on the toilet’s porcelain tank top and went back to work. Three more pieces remained hidden within the bag: The return mechanism, the bolt carrier group, and the trigger group. He’d disassembled the still-warm weapon before leaving home. The last thing he needed was a fucking rifle barrel poking out of his pack. That would draw some looks, some questions.

Not good. Not yet.

His fingers closed on the trigger group when the bathroom door burst open. Laughter echoed off the cold tile walls. He froze—greasy hair in his eyes, slender hands still in the bag—and peered out through a sliver of daylight between the stall door and the cubicle wall. Two kids stood side-by-side at the row of urinals on the facing wall, pissing and chattering.

Fuck.

He reached down in slow motion, his fingers tightening on the ice pick’s handle. He’d kill them if necessary. Silently, so as to not raise an early alarm.

They finished, zipped, and even washed their hands. The door closed with a bang. The bathroom fell silent. He went back to work, quicker now. Class would be starting any second. He found the pieces, snapped them together using the handy cross-pins. Typically effective German engineering, his father would have said.

He plucked three ammo clips from the bag and slammed one home. He jammed the other two into the waistband of his jeans. Finished, he hefted the rifle, opened the stall door and stepped out. He relaxed. If anyone came in now, he’d just start here. No problems.

He turned, dragged the backpack out of the stall with the toe of his sneaker and kicked it as hard as he could. It slid across the tile floor until it slammed into the far wall, next to the clanking steam radiator under the big frosted windows. It would sit there unnoticed for twenty-nine minutes, until a handsome young police officer found it with a victorious cry.

On his way out, he glanced into the grimy mirror above the sinks. A scrawny, dark-haired kid carrying a nasty black assault rifle looked back. He grinned, gave himself the thumbs up. He felt more alive at that moment than at any time in his eighteen years.

It was straight-up 8 o’clock on a Monday morning.


Well? I don't know about you, but I think the kid was right.

Yeah, but is it love?

Work is progressing nicely on my second novel, Empty Spaces. (The photo at left is how I imagine my character, Annie DeWitt, as looking.)

While the book is going well, it occurred to me today that I don't obsess over this one like I did The Devil You Don't Know. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing.

When I was writing TDYDK, it was ALL I ever thought about. At the gym, while working out or sitting in the steam room, I was constantly working out knotty plot issues and just generally worrying about the book. While I had several outlines for the first one, it was always changing because I spent so much time rolling the plot around in my brain.

It about drove me insane, to be honest with you.

Conversely, Empty Spaces is moving along at a nice pace -- without all the obsessing. To be honest, I kind of miss all that internal drama. I wonder if it's partly due to the fact that I know far more about fiction writing now? I mean, when I wrote the first one, I was struggling to just tell the damned story. I was always reaching deep to capture a particular scene or theme. After just a few hours at the keyboard, I was exhausted both mentally and emotionally.

Not so on this one. I write my scenes for the day, read it over and shut it down. Sometimes, I even whistle while I work.

This is not normal for me.

I LOVED my first story. It was personal. It was a story I had wanted to write for more than 25 years. It explores some very deep and deeply personal aspects of my life. It hurt to write.

This one is just plain a great story. Nothing more, nothing less. I like my characters, but I don't daydream about them like I did the first one. I honestly think this book has more intricate characters than the first one. It's certainly better written and better plotted (mainly since I know what I'm doing these days).

So why don't I love it? Is our first book like our first love, in that nothing after it ever feels quite the same? Or maybe I'm actually becoming a fiction writer and not just someone who is wrenching out his heart at the keyboard.

No matter the answer, this one feels good to write. Not painful. Not exhausting. Pleasurable.

Is that a problem?

I'm curious to hear from people working on second or third books. How did the experience differ from that first one? Can my book be great even if I don't daydream about it all the time?

When the thrill is gone

I haven't been in a good place lately.

No, I don't mean that I've been lurking in back alleyways or sinister bars. I'm talking more metaphorically. As we used to say back in the day, my head is in a bad place.

How so, you ask? Well. My personal life has been a bit, um, precarious the past couple of weeks. Kids and leaking roofs and bitter disappointments. Rinse and repeat. If there truly is a God, then He's been piling on of late.

But perhaps the biggest concern, for me anyway, is my recent reluctance to write. Be it this blog or my new book, I have been avoiding the keyboard like the plague. It's not even a reluctance, actually. More of an intense YAWN. Like, who the frick even cares?

Being an inquisitive little bugger, I've spent several days researching my dilemma and I believe I've stumbled upon the answer.

I am, in a word, paralyzed. (See? I'm a genius, aren't I?)

There's a reason for my nascent malaise, I believe. I suspect (or at least, I hope) some of you can relate. See, I spent so much time earnestly working on The Devil You Don't Know, naively believing that I would write my masterpiece and then, somehow, just get it published!

I mean, duh. Why would I not want to publish it? So, having no clue as to what I was doing, I rolled up my sleeves (as best I could, since I tend to write in tee-shirts) and wrote my book. Only after the two years it took me to write it did I learn enough of my craft to realize that it's JUST NOT THAT EASY.

While I'm not ready to say just yet that TDYDK will never be published, I admit I'm not as confident as I once was.

And now, I've sat down and started writing book two, Empty Spaces. It's a really awesome book, if I may say so myself. Really, really good. I've done my homework. It has pacing, snappy relevant dialogue, a smart plot and enough tension to string it between two electrical poles.

So what, you ask, is my problem?

To be honest, I sit and allow myself to look forward to another year or two of incredibly hard work, only to find myself right here again.

Look, I am a writer. I must write. Or die. It's that simple. But like most of us, I secretly want to succeed at it, to have others read it. To have an agent and ultimately a publisher love it as much as I do.

I want to -- let's be honest here -- make money at this thing called fiction writing.

I would give anything to go back in time, to that point when all I did was sit down and write, without worrying about all the crap that was to come.

So tell me, how do you soldier on when the thrill is gone?

ROLLER DERBY UPDATE: For those who care, my beloved Hard Knocks lost 134-109 Saturday night. It was a great bout and a tremendous success. The place was sold out, alternative rock and roll blared and the media was all over it. Very cool. And the wife took a teeth-jarring hit and bounced right up, although one girl on the other team was knocked unconscious for a few seconds.

Teaser Tuesday -- Empty Spaces

Since I've been unable to write much on Empty Spaces lately, due mainly to my anxiety at having my first partial out, I figured I would start a new weekly series, Teaser Tuesday.

It's my hope that once I get either a thumbs up or a thumbs down on the partial, I can relax and get back to my WIP. I decided to go with this particular weekly feature because it's commonplace among writer blogs, and it's relatively easy.

Before we start, I wanted to let you know that my blog, A Writer of Wrongs, was a featured blog on The Written Connection, a new directory of writer blogs assembled by A.M. Kuska. It can be found here http://www.uninvoked.com/writingblogs/wordpress/

My blog was rated 7 out of 10, and I received relatively poor marks for my lack of responding to comments and dearth of writing tips. I hereby pledge to do better on responding to comments, but I'm holding the line at offering advice, since I honestly don't feel I'm far enough on my journey to publication to be posting any writing tips.

I was interviewed for the feature, although I'm afraid I came off sounding like a doofus. (Interesting sidenote: I was just talking to a friend on the phone and asked him how to spell doofus. "Are you blogging?" he asked. Sigh. He knows me all to well.)

Now, on to my teaser for this week. It's a selection from Chapter 3, right after 17-year-old Annie DeWitt's suicide attempt. College teacher Grant Bachman, who survived a horrific school shooting along with Annie, arrives at the hospital and, upon learning the girl has no parents, takes her home. It sets up pretty much everything, plotwise. Enjoy:

* * * *

By 9:30 that Tuesday morning, the concentration of vodka and valium in her blood had decreased enough so that she could be released. The emergency room doctor, a young man with a fresh haircut who wore sandals with his khakis, spoke to Grant in the hallway as a nurse helped Annie get dressed.

“She hasn’t been very helpful in terms of how this happened,” he said. “She’s unwilling to tell us where her parents are. They don’t answer their house phone.”

Grant shrugged. “I’m afraid I can’t be of much help. I really don’t know her well. She’s a student of mine, but classes just started a couple of weeks ago.”

The doctor nodded. “I realize that, Mr. Bachman. You seem like a nice guy, so I’m willing to release her into your custody. Take her home and make sure someone keeps a close eye on her. She’s been through a lot and, while I can’t prove it, I suspect her accident last night might not have been so accidental.”

The doctor placed his hand on Grant’s shoulder. “I would strongly encourage you both to get counseling. No one goes through what you two did and comes out of it unscathed. I can recommend someone if you’d like.”

“Thank you,” Grant said, smiling. “That would be nice.”

“And you’ll speak to her parents?” the doctor asked as he scribbled a name on a sheet of paper and handed it to Grant.

“Yes,” Grant said, sliding the paper into his jeans pocket. “I will.”

* * * *

An hour later, they pulled up in front of a ramshackle Cape Cod on West Avenue F. The front yard looked like it hadn’t been mowed in weeks and ivy creepers covered one of the two front windows. He killed the engine and looked at Annie, who slumped in the passenger seat looking pale and ill.

“You’re home,” he said, aiming for cheerful and missing badly. “Let’s find your parents and get you to bed.”

“Parents,” she repeated, gazing at her home. “That might be a problem.”

“Oh?”

She turned to him and he was surprised to see tears in her eyes. “I don’t have any fucking parents. Not anymore.”

“You don’t?”

“The sperm donor left when I was a baby and my mom took off with some skanky meth addict a few weeks ago.” The girl blinked back tears, and Grant again fought the urge to take her into his arms. She sniffed and continued, “Mom likes to get wasted, and sometimes she just leaves. You know? Usually, she comes back in a few days. But not this time.”

“Crap,” Grant muttered, running his hand through his hair. He’d texted Lindsay to tell her he was taking the girl home, but by now she was at her part-time library job and the girls were at daycare. He’d been looking forward to a nice, long nap and then maybe a Red Sox game on television—anything to take his mind off of the past twenty-four hours.

“Look, Mr. Bachman—”

“Grant,” he said. “Call me Grant. Please.”

“Whatever. Grant. Just let me go in. I’ll be fine. I’m used to it.”

He shook his head. “I can’t just leave you here. You’ll have to come back to my house, until we find your mom.”

“I’m not a fucking kid,” Annie said, opening the car door. “I can take care of myself.”

Grant jumped out of the car and caught her just as she was sticking her key into the front door lock. He spun her around, harder than he had meant to, and held her by the shoulders.

“Look, Annie, you just tried to kill yourself. There’s no way in hell I’m leaving you here alone.”

“It was an accident,” she said, her lower lip quivering. “And you’re hurting me.”

“Sorry.” He let her go.

She smiled up at him. “Why don’t you come in and watch TV while I take a nap, if that makes you feel better? We don’t have air conditioning, but I think the cable is still working, unless the fuckers shut it off again.”

He hesitated. This was not a good idea. But leaving the girl alone was an even worse idea. And really, what else did he have to do today?

“Okay,” he said, “as long as you promise to talk to me about your situation when you feel better.”

She beamed. “It’s a deal, Grant.”