J. Todd Scott

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Call The Dark

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Tuesday, September 19th will see the release of my sixth book,  CALL THE DARK,  seven years after my debut  – THE FAR EMPTY.

Honestly, the two books couldn’t be more different. Hell, I couldn’t be more different, both as an author and maybe as a person.

Most of my novels have been driven by characters I’d fallen in love with or themes that I’d always wanted to explore. THE FAR EMPTY and the two other books in the Big Bend/Chris Cherry trilogy (HIGH WHITE SUN and THIS SIDE OF NIGHT) examined the “weight of the badge;” the burden and the responsibility that comes with carrying them, and whether you can continue to be a “good” person in a bad world. Chris Cherry and America Reynosa were already strongly fixed characters in my mind when I wrote those books, before I even wrote the first word, and they lived and breathed in that series, animating much of what others would call “plot.”

LOST RIVER was about the opioid epidemic and rural America. It was about my home state, about homecomings, and things I’d seen and experienced as a federal agent while working here. It was personal in a way that even the Big Bend books weren’t, and  I had Trey Dorado’s voice in my head for weeks, and the character of Van Dorn reflected a type of agent and personality I’d encountered in my long career.

THE FLOCK, which was less a crime novel and more a topical thriller – more topical than I first imagined since I wrote during the pandemic – was a thematic exercise for me. I’d always planned to write a novel about a cult, very much wanting to raise questions about faith and belief, and the limits of both. I’d been fascinated by how someone’s truth is often mutable, and the way the media can and sometimes defines our truth.  The aging Elise Blue, a character I loved writing, reflected a lot of my concerns about both aging and parenting.

CALL THE DARK is very different from those previous books. I wrote it after tossing away 100 pages of another book I was writing (okay, writers never quite “toss pages away,” we just save ‘em and hope we can make them better). CALL THE DARK didn’t start with a theme I’d long wanted to explore or even a character I’d been thinking about or a character’s voice in my head, it started with an image—a striking image of a small plane crashing on a remote mountainside during a late night snow storm; a fiery wreck observed by a lone woman, who’s burying…something…in the frozen ground.

Who that woman is, why she’s out that mountainside in the middle of the night, and what she’s burying, were things I only discovered while writing. This book has more of a cinematic, high-concept feel maybe than anything I’ve done (maybe that was because while I was writing it, I was also writing on the upcoming LAWMAN: BASS REEVES cable series). While it deals with some of the themes I always return to  again and again (family, choices, guilt) it’s not a message book. I do hope it’s entertaining and thrilling, though. It’s a very different book for me, but again, I’m a different person too, a different writer. The longer I walk this path, the more novels I get under my belt, I’ve come to learn that each book is a process in and of itself; each new novel is a new exploration, a new journey. Each one is surprising in its own way, even if you don’t end up where you thought you would.

It took me several months to get that young woman off that mountain. Hopefully it won’t take you that long to pick it up and find out how I did it.

JTS

 

Book Club!

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October 12, 2022

Contact: mesillavalleybookclub@gmail.com for the Zoom invitation

Or sign into Zoom: (Meeting ID: 822 1024 2285 Passcode: 463198)

Phone:  575-491-5041

Mesilla Valley Readers of Southern New Mexico Hosts Author J. Todd Scott

The Mesilla Valley Book Club invites you to a discussion with author J. Todd Scott, on Thursday, November 10, 2022 from 4-5 PM (MT) via Zoom.

Award winning novelist, J. Todd Scott, a 25-year veteran of the DEA, will discuss his most recent publication.  From http://jtoddscott.com/ The Flock is a chillingly engrossing thriller about a cult survivor who must confront the horrors of her past to ensure the safety of the future.

Ten years after a fiery raid kills her family, former cult member Sybilla “Billie” Laure has a completely new identity. She’s settled in rural Colorado with her daughter, hoping for a quieter life. But the world has other plans.

With wildfires raging and birds dropping from the sky, Billie wonders if her cult leader father’s apocalyptic predictions are finally coming true. When an intruder murders her husband and kidnaps her daughter, Billie has no choice but to confront the secrets of her past. But Billie’s journey has other perils, too―namely, a police chief hot on her trail, determined to expose the dangers of the defunct doomsday cult.

To save her daughter, Billie will have to go back to where it all began―to the ruined compound in New Mexico where the real threat is the truth.

Scott will discuss his research techniques, writing style and methods, and his other award-winning works: the trilogy of award-winning novels featuring Sheriff Chris Cherry of the Big Bend with ties to El Paso and the stand- alone novel, Lost River, a blistering crime novel of the opioid epidemic set in Kentucky and published in 2020.

The World Burns Bright

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WHERE WE ARE 2021 or HOW TO (POSSIBLY) ALIENATE ALL YOUR FANS

As I’ve said numerous times, writing is art, but publishing is a business.

A professional writing career is the successful, consistent, convergence of those two things.

But by the time I started seriously writing, I already had an established, time-consuming career (federal agent) that’s kept a roof over my head and the lights on for nearly three decades. THE FAR EMPTY, my debut novel, was written in the midst of that career; written out of pure passion and a burning desire to tell stories. Writing was truly a hobby, something I did in my spare time. And although I got an agent, I had little expectation that THE FAR EMPTY – or frankly, any book of mine – would sell. Now, five years later, I’ve had four novels published – three in the Big Bend/Chris Cherry series and last year’s stand-alone, LOST RIVER – was brought on for two great anthologies, and even hired to write on some film/TV projects.

My hobby became a pretty decent “second” career as well.

And trust me, I’ve been incredibly blessed and fortunate, lucky beyond belief, experiencing far more success than I ever could’ve dreamed of or deserve. But like every published writer, I’ve had my share of frustrations too. Publishing is a harsh, at times arbitrary business. For all the pre-publication talk about how my true-life experiences as a federal agent would translate to interest in my stories (all of which to date have touched on DEA and/or the Border in some measure), that never seemed to quite pan out, despite the books enjoying great reviews and loyal readers. Similarly, I suffered the same fate as many authors who published in 2020, a “lost” book – the aptly named LOST RIVER – that ultimately succumbed to little fanfare during the pandemic. LOST RIVER was an intimate, first-hand look at the opioid crisis, released in a year when more than 90k people succumbed to substance abuse disorder. Again, it was a timely book drawn on real-life experiences. Again, it was generously well-reviewed. Again, it didn’t quite catch fire the way I’d hoped.

Those four books were published by one of the oldest, most honored imprints in the business. Putnam’s been a wonderful home, and they loved those books as much I did. I have a great agent who’s been supportive of every decision and crazy idea, and has worked hard to make those ideas a reality. But the reality of publishing for every author is there are so many great books released each year, and the opportunities for any individual book to spark so fleeting, even success can feel like failure.

But as I wrote back on this very blog in October 2020, my “real” career affords me the luxury to constantly reassess my writing one, because the writing doesn’t keep the lights on. Although I’d love to publish every year like clockwork, I don’t have the pressure to just get a book done, any book, even one that’s not working. I can chase wild ideas, take chances, and truly write the stories I want, only those I’m most passionate about in the moment. That doesn’t mean anyone will ever publish them, but no one can stop me from writing ‘em.

So here we are—

Author of THE FAR EMPTY and LOST RIVER J. Todd Scott’s THE WORLD BURNS BRIGHT, pitched as THE GIRLS meets A HEAD FULL OF GHOSTS, in which a woman who survived a doomsday cult must rescue her daughter from a new generation of true believers while signs of the apocalypse are appearing, to Jessica Tribble Wells at Thomas & Mercer, in a two-book deal, for publication in fall 2022, by Carlisle Webber at Fuse Literary (world).

This is the book I alluded to back in October that I was tentatively calling THE ARK (and the title will likely change again, as these things often do). I wrote it during the teeth of the pandemic. I wrote it while I was moving from Texas to Kentucky; I wrote it while I was taking over a new job title at DEA and assuming a whole new slate of responsibilities for not one but three states; I wrote it on my laptop in hotel rooms and in the back of my car; I wrote it whenever I could steal a few minutes because my tried-and-true writing process was shot all to hell due to the move and the job and the pandemic and a host of other reasons.

The main thing is – I wrote it because it was the story I was burning to tell.

But here’s the disclaimer – the hard part to say out loud to all the generous fans I’ve gained since THE FAR EMPTY debuted – it’s ALMOST NOTHING like my other crime novels.

Hell, I’m not sure it technically is a straight crime novel.

It’s not about DEA or the Border or any of that stuff. It’s not about agents or dope or cartels. It’s less Don Winslow and CJ Box and more Paul Tremblay or Josh Malerman or Riley Sager. There’s maybe more Stephen King than Craig Johnson, and those who’ve listened to my readings or appearances know that I was actually agented on a ghost story. But it’s the story I had in my head – in fact, I’ve had a version of it rattling around for a while – and it’s one that allowed me to stretch and challenge myself as a writer and try something totally new, particularly when I didn’t really feel the other books were breaking new ground. And although I think it has some of the best traits of all my books – interesting, flawed characters and a dark beating heart – I know that for those fans – those of you – who were ready for another Chris Cherry book, or even something in the vein of LOST RIVER, it’s going to be a helluva pivot. Maybe too big a pivot, and I get that, but I sure hope some of you follow me down this new dark path for a bit anyway.

I took a chance writing this book. I hope you give it a chance too.

That doesn’t necessarily mean I’m done with the Big Bend, over even a spin-off from LOST RIVER. I have parts of both of done, and would love to return those worlds when the time and home is right.

But until then, here’s hoping THE WORLD BURNS BRIGHT catches fire in 2022.    

Writing is art but publishing is a business. A professional writing career is the successful, consistent convergence of those two things.

I’m thrilled to see what Jessica and Thomas & Mercer have planned for this book and the next, because although I’m slowly winding down my DEA career, I’m still at the start of this whole writing gig, and I have a lot of stories left to tell.

SEE YOU IN 2022

News Incoming

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It’s been a minute since I’ve had the opportunity to catch up with the latest book and publishing info, and I’m working on a blog post now. I plan on breaking down where I’ve been and what I’ve been up to…and more importantly, what’s coming next!

See you in a couple of weeks….

A Long Overdue Update

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A quick catch-up on the state of affairs!

It goes without saying that I’m not much of a blogger; my day job, and the novel writing, leave me little time to write posts or essays. But it’s been a long time since I checked in, and now is as good a time as any.

Honestly, I’ve been one of the lucky ones during the COVID-19 pandemic. I’m an essential employee (although let’s be honest, that’s a pretty hazy term), and other than a cross-country move (right in the first two months of the lock-down, and nothing I would ever recommend), I’ve been at work every day. In fact, I’ve bought and sold house, moved, driven back and forth to Texas (twice), been to Florida (twice), spent a week in Tennessee, and hosted my daughters from Arizona. 

If anything, I’ve been just as busy as I ever was before the pandemic.

That’s not to say the virus it hasn’t had an impact. I released LOST RIVER in June, almost four months ago now, and without the regular sort of promotion/publicity and book store events that prop up a new release, I’ve faced the real possibility that a book I worked hard on and I’m proud of will sink without a trace. It’s just incredibly difficult to generate much excitement enthusiasm and frisson for certain projects in this environment, and LOST RIVER may prove to be one, although it’s tough to draw hard conclusions (yet). That being said, I’m far from the only writer who’s had to face this, so even if LOST RIVER never quite finds an audience now, I hope it finds fans in the future.

Similarly, the various other projects I’ve been involved in (film and TV) have all taken on water too, victims of COVID-19 and the subsequent lock downs and a general re-assessment (I think) of the kind of stories that are viable and pertinent and immediate to the moment. It’s fair to say that I spent late 2018 and a good chunk of 2019 devoted to these projects, and while they were lucrative and enjoyable and I learned a tremendous amount from them, there’s a decent risk that these might not get their heads above water either. Such is Hollywood. That’s not an indictment of the business, that’s the reality of the business of being (a part time) professional author and screenwriter.

So, in terms of novels, what did I get done? A chunk of a crime thriller, titled BURN DOWN. The start of the 4th Chris Cherry novel (tentatively titled A SILENT SKY), a possible Casey Alexander book, file-saved as THE NIGHT ROOM. A full re-write of 13 DAYS, a book that I’m fond of but just can’t seem to nail down; a bit of another book without a decent working title, and finally, the one I’m currently working and aiming to finish by the end of this year that I’m simply calling ARK (yeah, it’ll have a different title when I’m done). 

ARK, like LOST RIVER, is another stand-alone. One of things I had several discussions with both my publisher and agents about was trying my hand at some different novel genres, since my film/TV stuff has ranged from sci-fi to horror. And one of the advantages of my “day career” – and it is a career, I’ve been doing this whole federal agent thing for 25 years – is that I do have the luxury of writing the kind of books I want to, when I want to. Now, that doesn’t mean anyone will publish them, but I can afford to take the occasional flier on a book, without worrying if it lands. The disadvantage? Sometimes the career truly does swamp everything else, and when I was promoted to the Special Agent in Charge and moved back home to Kentucky – in the teeth of this pandemic – I spun my wheels on another book that wasn’t going anywhere, all the while juggling work, the move, new responsibilities, and the family, as we all dealt with pandemic disruptions, before returning to ARK for the homestretch.

And I am in the homestretch for ARK. I feel damn good about it.

THE FAR EMPTY debuted in 2016, and I’ve been fortunate since then to release three more novels, be published in two anthologies and one magazine, create and sell an original audio series, write three feature film screenplays (and earn my WGA membership), and a TV series pilot. I’ve also been talking with my German publisher recently, as we get closer to releasing THE FAR EMPTY over there. That’s a helluva lot of full-time work in a short amount of time for a part-time professional, and I don’t plan on stopping soon. Although 2019 was challenging personally and 2020 has been challenging professionally, I’ve still been able to create and produce. 

That’s always been the one constant…one word, right after another.

Best, JTS 

Writing is hard work but publishing is a tough business…

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I get this question a lot, and most recently when I went to Dallas last year to meet with the wonderful folks at the Dallas Creative Writer’s Workshop:

What’s your relationship with your editor?

And my answer went something like this:

It’s always been great and I’ve been lucky; we’ve never had really had to tear a book apart. Most of our edits together have been pretty minimal.

Cue ominous music…and flash forward two days later, when I got an early alert warning email from my agent:

I think your editor has some issues with your latest book…but don’t panic!

My “latest book” was my first foray outside the comfortable confines of the Big Bend novels I’ve been writing the last few years; another Texas-set crime novel, true, but with all new characters and all new themes. It was a big book (I had a lot I wanted to say) and I’d put a lot of work into it. The pitch was simple – a retiring sheriff has thirteen days to solve the murder of a local drug dealer; a lifelong “frenemy” who’d married a woman they’d both vied for when younger. The working title was THIRTEEN DAYS, but the book actually covered a span of four decades, cutting back and forth across those years as I filled in the relationship between these two men and the woman between them.

It was my masterpiece…or so I thought.

I had a day or so to ponder my editor’s unspoken concerns before I got her editorial letter, and honestly, that was a miserable stretch. I hashed and rehashed where the book might have failed – where I had failed – and what the issues could be. After three books, this truly was the first time I’d turned in one that had even remotely raised a red flag, and despite my agent’s admonishment not to panic, that’s exactly what I did.

Hell, that’s ALL I did.

Worse, I’d just started believing I had a handle on this “whole writing thing.” I’d pitched and sold an original audio series, I was being approached about TV work, and even signed on to co-write a feature-length film!

I was beginning to feel comfortable in my “author skin.”

So, when the letter finally pinged in my email box, I read it with dread…and…well, it wasn’t good. Oh, my editor loved all the usual stuff I do well, but overall the book was simply too dark, too existential. She thought the characters were hard to relate to and even harder to like. The primary issue was balance. I’m a crime writer, and although a particularly brutal crime anchors the story, the crime itself took a backseat to an extended character study, and a particularly bleak one at that.

In short, the book wasn’t “on brand,” and wasn’t publishable as written as my next Putnam “J. TODD SCOTT” novel.

Naturally, my initial inclination was to push back; to pull up a dozen other bleak and dark books for comparison and contrast. I was hellbent to convince my editor that “she just didn’t get it,” and point out all the ways she was wrong (with plenty of page citations).  I told myself that was the natural, expected reaction of any writer or artist who’d sunk months and months into a creative project that meant something to them, but after I thought about it some more (and sat out on the porch with a…couple…of beers), I realized something –

I’d written the book I wanted to write.

It said all the things I’d wanted to say. I’d told the story just the way I’d envisioned it…and nothing in my editor’s concerns or her letter could change that.

But…but…in the end, that didn’t mean anyone had to like it, much less publish it that way. And I think that’s one of the defining differences between being a writer and a (traditionally published) professional author.

The writer in me had achieved my goals with the book, now the author in me had to decide if I could re-work or revise it to meet the expectations of my publisher and my audience.

Now, I get it, some people don’t want to make those compromises, ever, or even face them. That’s a reasonable position, I guess. And others might see that calculation as forsaking some sort of “artistic integrity.” But I see it as the cold, clear-eyed business reality of professional publishing – a publishing career – which means you gotta pick the hills you’re willing to die on, and you can’t die on all of them.

If you do, that’s an awful short career.

A day later my editor and I had a great call about the book where we picked apart her concerns. It was a deep, engaged discussion about what didn’t work and those things that did. I decided I probably could re-balance and re-focus the narrative, but it would take time (I write consistently but not necessarily rapidly), and I knew it would be tough to get it done fast enough to lock it in for a 2020 release, which was very important to me.

I had zero margin of error and I was staring at a lot of work in a short amount of time, with still no guarantee I could get it done or the book would be any better for it when I finished.

But, remember I said I write consistently? Well, I’d just finished up another book (in fact, I was already a third of the way through the book AFTER that), so I asked my editor if she might just want to take a look at that one? I was really happy with it (of course, I’d been happy with THIRTEEN DAYS as well…so…), but I knew it didn’t hit any of the landmines THIRTEEN DAYS had tripped over. I suggested that if the new book was closer to being ready, maybe we could just, you know, swap ‘em? I didn’t have any idea if that was even possible or routinely done, but since it was otherwise just sitting there on my hard drive, it made sense to me that if she liked it, that might give the time I needed to figure out if I could reshape THIRTEEN DAYS in a way we’d all be happy with.

My editor said she’d be happy to take a look at the other manuscript, as long as I went on ahead and started breaking THIRTEEN DAYS apart too, with an eye toward doing whatever I had to in order to get it ready for 2020.

And as I started that deep work, as I started to really re-examine the story and the characters, I did see a path forward. It wouldn’t necessarily be the story as I’d originally written it, but that was okay, it could still be a story, a book, I’d be just as proud of.

But my editor came back and said the new book, tentatively called LOST RIVER, was in great shape, and with some small adjustments (much more in line with what we’d done on my previous Big Bend novels), it’d be ready to go.

In fact, she wanted to move LOST RIVER ahead of my revised THIRTEEN DAYS, so it’d be a win/win. My publisher would get a book they’re thrilled with, and I’d get a more reasonably paced “do over” at a book I’m not quite ready to give up on.

Writing is hard work but publishing is a tough business.

I think publishing is where art meets commerce, and if all you care about is writing what you want, however you want, you can do that. But if you’re working with a publisher, and you’re being paid for that work, then I think it pays to be flexible and open-minded. You’re not always going to have “another book” waiting in the wings, but that doesn’t mean you can’t adjust, when it’s called for.

Anyway, just a few thoughts. And as always, YMMV.

2018 was a great year professionally, and I can’t wait to see what 2019 brings. I have two works coming out, so keep an eye out for them. First, I have a story in the wonderful charity anthology, GATHER AT THE RIVER, and then the big release, the third Big Bend novel, THIS SIDE OF NIGHT!

Also, the paperback version of HIGH WHITE SUN hits stands.

See you around, JTS