Matt Gentry | The Roanoke Times

Scott Sanders, who has published his first novel, "The Hanging Woods," was photographed in an overgrown gazebo behind his Christiansburg home Monday.

CHRISTIANSBURG -- Five years ago, Scott Loring Sanders gave up a sales job and regular paychecks to be a writer. It's the sort of career change that makes your family worry, but he stuck to the businessman's playbook. Rule No. 1: Stay disciplined.

Sanders entered the graduate writing program at Hollins University, vowing never to miss class, earn top grades and leave with a publishable manuscript.

He missed exactly one class for a funeral, he said, tallying his results at the kitchen table of his Christiansburg home earlier this week, and graduated with a 3.96 grade point average.

And this month, "The Hanging Woods," his first novel, was published to warm initial reviews. He has a batch of book signings in the coming weeks and a second novel due out next spring.

"Right now, I've had two cups of coffee and I'm number one on Tower books" -- he had just discovered he topped one of the teen best-seller lists at the online book store -- "and I feel good," Sanders said.

But "The Hanging Woods" does not match its author's mood.

It is a dark novel set in a depressed Alabama town in the mid-1970s. Walter, the story's 13-year-old voice, and two buddies -- the softie Mothball and the popular but suffering Jimmy -- try to enjoy summer despite the harassments of poverty and their parents.

The three sneak out at night, swim in the Tallapoosa River and get a thrill from tormenting the Troll, a Vietnam War vet who silently wanders the woods. After some unlucky first attempts, Mothball tries to break the record for keeping a headless chicken alive.

But boyhood mischief leads to bullying, deceit and troubling secrets. Walter, who is shaken from the book's start after reading his mother's diary, is increasingly fascinated by violence. And life in the fictional Woodley, Ala., offers quite a bit. On the first page, he beats a fox to death with a hickory stick.

The novel, the author knows, sits at the boundary of young adult fiction. In a starred review, the children's book review "The Bulletin" said readers seeking simple morality would find "The Hanging Woods" unsettling. The trade journal "Publishers Weekly" warned the squeamish away from the "potent first novel."

Sanders explained the content and gruff dialogue mirrors the world of 13-year-old boys. "I let the characters dictate where it's going to go," he said, and for Walter that was to the fringes of behavior. "I realized pretty quick he was a dark character and had some issues."

Scott Miller, Sanders' literary agent, sees his client's book as a cross between "To Kill a Mockingbird" and the movie "Stand By Me," but with an edginess that is creeping into young adult fiction.

"You can get away with a lot more in YA than you used to," Miller said of the genre. "It reflects that kids are growing up faster than we probably would like them to."

But Sanders is quick to say he didn't set out to write for a teen audience, and worries the category may limit who reads his work. "In today's market, if the narrator is a teenager," he said, the book is classified as young adult -- a shelf adults may ignore at the bookstore.

"Today, they probably wouldn't buy 'Catcher in the Rye,' " he said.

The life-changing call

Sanders is 37, easy-going and seems to have perpetually tousled hair. He grew up in New Jersey, far from the Alabama backwoods of his novel, but he had a boyhood crew and a love for the woods that was sprinkled into his book. While trapping as a teenager, he was forced to beat a fox to death, too. ("It was horrible. That ended my trapping career.")

As a college student, he transferred from a smaller California school to Virginia Tech. The first person he met was his wife-to-be, Jocey. In 1993, they had a son, Mason, and the new father was eager to get work when he graduated the following year.

The family settled in Floyd and Sanders held a few odd jobs -- waiter, house painter, working a Christmas tree farm -- before joining Roanoke's Verizon office in 1998. He was a sales consultant and his job was the "upsell," enticing customers to upgrade their services. The pay was good but the work was empty. "I didn't want to be a suit," he realized.

Sanders, who had loved reading since he was a boy, started working on a novel at night. "So after a year, I finished it, and it was horrible," he said. His wife suggested going back to school.

Hollins wait-listed, then rejected him. He left for a Hawaiian vacation, a prize he had won at work, and returned to a message from the admissions office saying a place had opened for him in the writing program. "That's the day my life changed," Sanders said.

He notched a few important scores for a developing writer, publishing in short story journals and winning an honorable mention in a student writing contest from The Atlantic Monthly in 2004. A framed copy of the letter still sits above his writing desk, where he composed "The Hanging Woods" as his thesis at Hollins.

The book sold to Houghton Mifflin Co. in March 2006. The next month, he won a writing fellowship that sent him to France, where he finished his second, untitled novel, scheduled to be published by Houghton Mifflin in spring 2009. For the past few years, Sanders has taught writing and English classes at New River Community College.

The career change -- from salesman to writer -- is complete. Sanders has launched a Web site, scottloringsanders.com, and is working to "get that brand out there." It's another lesson from the cubicle, he said, "nobody's going to do this for you."

Call it Rule No. 2: Be a self-starter.