The Writers Chair - Rand R. Timmerman

In this gripping episode of In the Writer's Chair, host Lana McAra welcomes Rand R. Timmerman, a retired attorney and Marine combat veteran who began his prolific second act as an author at age 70. Rand shares the fascinating inspiration behind his latest book, The Syracuse Hit Man Versus a Shoe Repairman, a story of violence, redemption, and spiritual transformation based on a real-life genius "hit man" he met in recovery.

Rand dives into his "movie-like" writing process and how decades of experience as a litigator prepared him to craft compelling courtroom dramas. He also recounts a harrowing real-life encounter with a client that nearly cost him his life—a story that serves as the basis for his next high-stakes novel.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

• The Attorney-to-Author Pipeline: How writing legal briefs and affidavits for decades translates into powerful fiction.
• Real-Life Inspiration: The incredible true story of "Ronnie," a Mensa-level genius and former hit man whose life transformation inspired Rand's latest book.
• The Atmosphere of Syracuse: Exploring the unique, historical ethnic enclaves of Syracuse, New York, and how they shape the setting of Rand's work.
• Writing as a "Movie": Rand’s unique process of visualizing his stories in vivid color and letting the plot unfold organically as he writes.
• Themes of Redemption: Why spiritual recovery and transformation are central motifs in both of Rand's books.
• Combat Instincts in the Courtroom: A chilling account of how Rand’s Marine Corps training saved his life during a confrontation with a dangerous former client.

About Our Guest:

Rand R. Timmerman is a retired attorney and a Marine combat veteran of the Vietnam War. Based in Syracuse, New York, he turned to writing later in life, publishing his first memoir about hiking the Appalachian Trail and transitioning into crime fiction. Rand is a dedicated advocate for recovery and uses his writing to promote messages of hope and redemption.

Connect with Rand:

• Website: randtimmerman.com 

Featured in this Episode:

• The Syracuse Hit Man Versus a Shoe Repairman: Rand’s newest novel.
• A Spiritual Passage: Rand’s memoir about his journey on the Appalachian Trail.
• Vella Publishing: Today’s sponsor, a traditional publisher with an untraditional model that empowers authors to keep their rights and royalties.

Looking for more? Subscribe to In the Writer's Chair for more candid conversations about the writing life. Visit VellaPublishing.com to learn how you can grow your presence as a career author.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

In the Writer's Chair, candid conversations about the writing life with Lana McCara and Vandela Publishing.

SPEAKER_01 0:10

Welcome to In the Writer's Chair, where we pull up a chair to talk about writing craft, the writing life, and what's possible for writers right now. Today I'm delighted to welcome Rand R. Timmerman to the podcast. Rand is a retired attorney and marine combat veteran from the Vietnam War, who started writing books when he was 70. He has published two books and show several short stories. He's married with two four daughters and seven grandchildren and lives in Syracuse, New York. His latest book, The Syracuse Hitman versus the Shoe Repairman, is based on a true story, and we're going to talk about that in just a minute. Welcome, Rand.

SPEAKER_00 0:56

Thank you, Lana. Great to be here. Appreciate it.

SPEAKER_01 0:59

So your career was as an attorney. What what got you started writing fiction?

SPEAKER_00 1:05

Actually, so I started writing when I retired, which was in 2014. And it's funny because I realized I had spent my whole career writing. I wrote every day. I would go into the office at 6 6 30 in the morning and I would start dictating draft complaints and briefs and affidavits. I was writing every day. And then I would my staff would type it out for me, and then I would take sometimes I would take drafts to court. And it was there was time when I wasn't busy, I would start working on the. So I was in the habit of writing and had a pretty good brain. I could take facts and tell a story, try to grab the court's attention, or whoever's going to read it. So it made writing for me easy. And then when I did retire, I was in a program to be sober. I had some alcohol issues. I knew the first time I drank, it was probably going to be a problem. The good news on that one was I decided never to do any drugs. I never did. I never smoked real, I never did anything because alcohol did everything I wanted it to for a long time, and it wasn't a problem. But later in my life it became an issue, and I got into a recovery program, and then I started being around other people, and some of them were very accomplished and different in different careers. Yeah. And I so I just started writing. I had a million stories. I'm 80 now and I write every day pretty much.

SPEAKER_01 2:40

Yeah, I've been impressed in the past because I do write crime fiction myself, and to see how a lawyer can get into a courtroom and tell a story, and there's so many stories told all the time in that setting that I think lawyers would make good storytellers. They are storytellers.

SPEAKER_00 3:04

Yeah, it comes easy to us. We get used to trying to present something that's compelling and interesting and grabs mostly it's the judges, but you got a sometimes you got a jury. And you learn how to be persuasive and to be interesting and to make the boring exciting in some ways.

SPEAKER_01 3:27

Your new book, The Syracuse Hitman versus the Shoe Repairman, which I love that title. Where did you get the idea for that one?

SPEAKER_00 3:36

In my recovery program, there was a guy by the name of Ronnie. He's gone now. He was in his he was a couple years older than me. I'm 80 now, so this is back six, seven years ago. And uh he was blind, so I started taking him to meetings. And he's a very accomplished man. He had a high mucky muck uh job in a manufacturing facility by one of the automotive companies with thousands of employees, and he was in charge of all their equipment. The guy was immense, he was a genius, mathematically, especially. He was married, had kids, but oh my god, he had all these stories when he was in his 20s, and he had a really tough childhood, really bad. Every possible thing that could happen bad to a child pretty much happened to him and his brother, Tippi. And so he's telling me all these stories and going down to Philadelphia and doing a hit job and killing nine guys and just outrageous stuff. And I asked, I had a sponsor at the time that helped me get sober and stay sober. And if they were true, uh and Billy would never gossip. So he would say one of two things either he's got a good heart, he did not say that about Ronnie, or he's the real deal, which was a way of telling me, yeah, it's pretty much true. So I don't know, Ronnie got really sick, he had to have her lung removed, and he was a heavy smoker. Then he recovered from that, and then he started smoking again. Guy was a very unusual person, but I knew his personality in and out, and I don't know. Then when I started, I did my first book, which was a memoir basically about hiking the Appalachian Trail. So that was all real. But I realized this was an interesting situation, and I could use it to be maybe inspirational to people of all backgrounds, of somebody of his type of personality and what he went through, and then what he became and then how he was transformed into something totally different. That's just amazing. That does not happen very often in the real world. So I combined the fiction and the trueness of his experiences to some extent. And he didn't tell me an awful lot, but he told me enough to give me the guts for a really interesting book.

SPEAKER_01 6:04

What a great character. Because usually when you think of a hitman, you think of somebody that isn't too smart, they just lumber along and they're willing to do whatever it takes to make a little money. But this guy, he had some amazing brains. He was so smart. You would think, why didn't he put him put his brains to work? Which I guess he did later.

SPEAKER_00 6:28

Yeah, oh, he used it too in that profession as well, and he kind of looked down on people. That comes through in my storytelling about what kind of a guy he was, a very tough guy, and he'd been through a lot, he had all kinds of resentment and anger management issues and all kinds of and he was trigger-happy and he was a tough guy, and then somehow he turned into the exact opposite. And so we tell that story in the book, too. It's about, you know, it's about violence and bad stuff and terrible childhoods and all that kind of stuff, and then it's about transformation and being making a connection with a higher power, which Ronnie didn't think that was even possible, and then becoming a totally different being redeemed and making amends and trying to do the right thing. Yeah, it's a very compelling story for sure. And I have a lot of fun writing it. I really did. I didn't do all I didn't do any research really. I just went with what he and course I know that area. I think writers need to, if you're gonna write a book, it should be about something you know a lot about, and also that you're very familiar with the area, so you can be accurate in some of your descriptions and things like that. Because your biggest audience is gonna be the people that live in that area, right? Probably.

SPEAKER_01 7:46

Oh yeah. Yeah, your primary audience will be in the area. And uh have you lived in Syracuse all your life?

SPEAKER_00 7:53

Gosh, no, I would grew up in Adams, New York, which is 50 miles north of there, 60 miles north. And my office is in Watertown, which is on the east side of the Lake Ontario. It's about an hour and a half from Ottawa, Canada, so we're way up there, a very rural type area, too. But no, I moved down to Syracuse four or five years before I wrote the book. My daughter moved there with her husband. She was, they were both in the military, and so yeah, that's how I came to Syracuse. But uh, yeah, Syracuse is a really interesting city in its own right, with all the different enclaves of you know, Irish and Irish Catholics and Italians and Greeks, and so you had mobs that were Italian and Greek and Irish, and they were competing with each other, and the mayor of Syracuse went to prison for Syracuse is a Greek name of a city, and the mayor of Syracuse was corrupt, and he was Greek, and he went to prison for it. Syracuse is a very interesting city, that's all I'm gonna say. And it's very it's 100,000 people, it's not huge and tremendous old neighborhood. I love Syracuse, it's so different from most cities, and the bad neighborhoods aren't really that bad, and we're pretty much safe most places. Some places you want to go at night, probably, but it's different for sure. And then I would see all these people in my recovery program on a daily basis, and they would jibe each other, and you can almost see the historical competition that they had, their ancestors had, and how it's ameliorated down to what it is now, one big pretty much loving family. And yeah, I just love it.

SPEAKER_01 9:51

And isn't there a strong Polish community in Syracuse as well?

SPEAKER_00 9:56

Oh yeah, yeah. I didn't mean to leave leave anybody out. There's actually Ukrainian. There's the American Polish home, is not very far from where I live, and then half a mile away up on a hill is a Ukrainian church, and then you've got you got Irish neighborhoods, and the traffic lights are the green is on top instead of the bottom. Tipperary hill, that's a whole area in Syracuse. It's per was predominantly Irish at one time. Now it's everybody's in there, but yeah.

SPEAKER_01 10:30

Wow, it's so interesting that the old towns were so segmented, where today everybody's mixed up, which I like that. I like that everybody's mixed up, but uh yeah, they stayed apart and they had their own cult culture, customs, and food and all of that. Yeah. I'm gonna take 30 seconds right now to thank our sponsor, Vandela Publishing. Vandela Publishing is a traditional publisher with an untraditional model where the author keeps all their rights and all their royalties. And we train our authors and develop them into career authors where there is longevity, it isn't just one book and done. And so if you'd like to know more, check out our website. It's V as in Victor, E-N-D-E-L-A, Vandela Publishing.com. Rand, let's talk a little bit about your writing process. Do you plan out the whole book or do you sit down and just start going?

SPEAKER_00 11:35

I sit down and start going, but it's probably more complex and a little better preparation than you might think. But I know the traditional way and the right way is probably to do an outline and then have separate sheets for each character and write out their physical characteristics and maybe their mental and emotional type proclivities and all that kind of stuff. Uh, I started writing, I was already in my 70s, and I didn't even know how to do that stuff. I have just learned how to do it. I do a little bit of that, but not very much. I usually have an overall theme in my head of what it's gonna be about. It's based on something in the real world, and then I just, it's like a movie for me. I'm very vivid in everything. I dream in vivid colors, which is sometimes not good in nightmares, but and I had a lot of them after the war, but not so much anymore. But no, I have I just start writing and I'm watching a movie and I'm seeing the people, and I have each one is a special kind of a person, and I can see their I see the color of their eyes, how their hair I they are even though if they're fictional, they're still to me, they're a real person. And I give them a name and I have a hard time changing their names because they become a person, and and that helps me as far as being when I'm writing about them and what they're might be doing and what they look like and all that kind of stuff. And then the movie plays out, and the interesting thing for me is uh I will go in a certain direction for quite a while sometimes, and then all of a sudden something will pop in, and then I'll go in a different direction for a while, and then something else will come up, and then I'll go in another direction, and then all of a sudden, when I get to the editing process, I realize no, some of this isn't working, and I will take stuff out and have new things in, and the other part of it that's really exciting for me, Lena, is I never know where it's going for sure. I never know. So all kinds is in my book, there's all kinds of courtroom scenes where I use my I was a litigator, so I did a ton of I if I didn't go to court one day during the week, I would feel strange because I was in court pretty much every day. If I didn't have a day where I was in court, I'd be like, what do I do? Maybe I had to go to the work office and get some work done, but not be working all night long every and stuff like that. Lawyers are pretty much very hardworking people, and uh but yeah, I put a lot of that stuff in there. The readers will get a kick out of some of this stuff, and it a lot of it is based on things that sort of happened in real life, and I might have jazzed it up a little bit, but I had a great career, a lot of interesting things that happened, and I incorporated it. You should write what you know, even in a novel, you or a historical novel, or just a straight-up book of fiction, write about what you know, and then incorporate your characters into that and make it interesting. I always try to have a great opening line for every chapter, and then at the end, there's always a hook of I make some kind of an intimidation about what's intimation of what's gonna come next. And the reader's gonna one of my friends' wives read the book, and she's I couldn't put it down. I just couldn't put it down. Every chapter, I go, I'm gonna go to bed now.

SPEAKER_02 14:54

No, just a few more pages.

SPEAKER_00 14:58

Yeah, that's what you want for sure. You've written a lot of books. Run Cindy, run. Same thing, right? Hard to put down.

SPEAKER_01 15:05

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:06

You want to know what's gonna happen next because it's gonna be good.

SPEAKER_01 15:10

I love the courtroom scenes because the way you did like the defense attorney and the prosecution and the interaction with the judge, it was just so great because I felt like I was literally sitting there in the courtroom watching all of this happening, and the good thing about a novel is that you get to know some of the undercurrents that you might not see if you were actually in the real courtroom, but there's different things underneath going on here, and that just ramps everything up.

SPEAKER_00 15:42

And you're talking with people uh my book is all about criminal court. So you're talking about bad people, you're talking about victims, you got all kinds of personality and emotional issues that you can play around with and that are happened in the real world, and people can relate to somebody in there for sure. You got good guys, bad guys, good girls, bad girls, whatever. Yeah, you want to have a real salad of different types of people, but be relatable one way or the other. You either hate them or you love them.

SPEAKER_01 16:20

Yeah, yeah. I always love, and you did it so well. You have the good, bad guy, and the bad, good guy. They just get mixed up in there somehow.

SPEAKER_02 16:36

Yep, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 16:38

This is your second book, so tell us just a little bit about your first book and how the two books are related to each other.

SPEAKER_00 16:48

My first book about hiking the Appalachian Trail? Yeah, they're related to each other in the terms of the redemption and the whole transformation thing from coming from being a person with serious problems to somebody different that puts themselves out there and helps other people, whether it be addiction or other types of difficulties. And so in the Appalachian Trail book, which is a spiritual passage, and actually it's amazing. If you Google a spiritual passage, it pops right up. Really? Yes, it's amazing. And I just tried it again the other day. I have another book I'm in. The author wrote he's in Australia, it's called You Are Not Alone. And I wrote a chapter in that book, and that book is coming out right now. The author is Barry Zwarnstein, and he was in the Rhodesian War at the same time I was in Vietnam, basically.

SPEAKER_01 17:43

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 17:44

Yeah, and uh so he wrote that book, and but the title is You Are Not Alone. So I Googled the other day, there's gotta be 20 books. The title is You Are Not. I didn't even know you could get away with that.

SPEAKER_01 17:57

Oh, yeah. Titles can't be copyrighted.

SPEAKER_00 18:01

So he's kind of lost in the forest, but my book just had spirits, you would think there'd be like 10 or 12 at least, pops right up. I don't maybe my computer is controlled by AI and they're messing around with the results of the book.

SPEAKER_01 18:18

Trying to give you a good result, like they always do.

unknown 18:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:22

So my common th theme with both books was basically about redemption and recovery and that kind of stuff, because I like to have happy endings. I like to have spiritual messages in there and what we can the whole idea in the end is to try to promote the idea that if we do certain things and have a good relationship with a higher power, we can become the person that God always wanted us to be. So I try to have that as a common theme, it's buried in there, but as it goes along, you can see oh, okay, yeah, people can be better than what they are if they do certain things. And so that's my underlying theme and driving in pretty much in all my books in one fashion or yes.

SPEAKER_01 19:04

It's a powerful message because so many times people want to write themselves off. I'm too far gone, I could never be different. Yeah, but you can. You absolutely can. Yeah. So what's next for you? You got another book coming out? Another book on Yes.

SPEAKER_00 19:22

I'm in three different author groups. By the way, I gave you a plug this morning on another podcast I was on about Vandela publishing and the Monday night, what we're doing on Monday nights, because uh most people are could be welcome to that, right? If they're authors or writers, or how's that work?

SPEAKER_01 19:39

That Monday night, our Monday night meetings are for Vandela authors only, but we have a membership that meets the first Monday of the month that can join us. So we do have other people come in on the first Monday of the month as part of our membership because I had a lot of people asking me. I'm not I've already published my book with somebody else, but I really want to get in on those meetings, and so I created the membership for the first Monday only because that's when I teach marketing, and that's why we had some extra people there last night, they're part of that membership.

SPEAKER_00 20:13

So that was Roxanne, and Roxanne was on the meeting I was on this morning before this one. So I hope I didn't create you a problem. I was trying to promote Vendela and that's terrific. Because I was bragging about you. You do a great job.

SPEAKER_01 20:27

Thank you. Thank you, Rand. I'm so proud to have you as one of our authors because I just love what you're doing. I love your book. So tell us what the new book is that you're writing. Are you writing a new novel or just doing the chapter, chapter submissions for other books?

SPEAKER_00 20:44

No, my the book I'm working on now, I had a client who tried to kill me back in the 90s. It's funny because one of the counties I went to was Lewis County in upstate New York. It's 1,200 square miles and it's 30,000 people, and the county seat is Lowville, which has 3,500 people. And they have two murders every couple of decades. And in the 80 and 90, there was there was two, and I was involved in both of them. How the hell does that happen? One of them I represented a defendant and ended up interviewing the FBI lab director. It was the first case contesting DNA evidence in the whole country. Yeah. And it never got any publicity. I subpoenaed the director of the lab, and I asked her how often she'd been in court. She said, This is the first time. And then the other one was the guy's name was Donald Zeller, and he had been a client of mine for quite a while. I got him custody of a two year old child, which was unheard of in those days. But he was ticked off because the mother still. Had supervised visitation and he fired me. And then anyway, he confronted me in a courtroom one day after in the courthouse after everybody else had left, and my Marine Corps instincts kicked in, and I he was twice as my he could have mopped the floor with me, but innately I knew he was a bully, and I just went at him and he didn't expect that, and he just left. But next day he killed the mother of his child. Ooh! Another man and wounded her cousin, disappeared, which put me and my family in a rough position for a week or so. And he ended up dying at a roadblock in Lewis County. They said he committed suicide. Yeah, there were 20 bullet holes. I went and saw the vehicle. There was 20 bullets on the windshield. So he committed suicide by cop is what it ended up being, basically.

SPEAKER_01 22:54

Yes, right.

SPEAKER_00 22:55

So that's that's a pretty interesting story. I jazzed up the ending of it to make it a little more interesting than that. Put myself in there in a weird way, but but most of it's true. I just write about what happened, and that's the other thing, Lane. If you want to write a book, write about something intimately, right? Because it makes it so easy. Because now this you've seen this movie before, but you're just putting it out there. And it makes it incredible fun, it really does. And I get to mock other lawyers and judges and stuff like that a little bit.

SPEAKER_02 23:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 23:31

That thing was amazing, that whole story.

SPEAKER_01 23:36

Yeah, yeah. Isn't it interesting? Because these bullies they don't realize that people have backgrounds. You're not just somebody that went to college and came out with a law degree, never did another thing in your life. You're a marine combat veteran. And he thinks he's gonna do something. That is just not very smart.

SPEAKER_00 23:58

Yeah, he knew he had me blocked in. I couldn't get out without going by him, but he didn't exp bullies like what he expected was for me to cower and beg for mercy, and I did the opposite. Because what I learned in combat is that if somebody's trying to get kill me, I get very angry.

unknown 24:17

I'll just put it that way.

SPEAKER_00 24:19

And I just I reacted. I just reacted like I was in combat again, and he was like, whoa, I'm out of here.

SPEAKER_01 24:27

Yeah, yeah. That that training, it could be decades away, but it's still in there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 24:37

Well, save me, save my life that day for sure. He had his hands in his pockets. Later, we found out he had all kinds of weapons, he had machine guns, he had grenades, all kinds of handguns. I don't know if he had a handgun that day or a grenade. I don't know which it was in his pocket, but he had one or the other. And I knew something like that was going on, but he never pulled it out.

SPEAKER_01 25:00

Yeah, yeah. So how can we get more? Do you have a website you want to leave with us or sure.

SPEAKER_00 25:06

Randimmerman.com. Just my name, small caps, no punctuation in my name, rantimmerman.com, and it pops right up. I just checked it again a little while ago.

SPEAKER_01 25:17

Okay, okay, awesome. Rand, this has been a fun conversation. Thank you so much for being with us today.

SPEAKER_02 25:23

Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 25:26

And thank you for being with us. Thanks for pulling up a chair. We'll see you next time.