The Conscience of Abe’s Turn

This is an epic story idea I’ve been mulling over for a long time. And the thing that prevented me from going forward on it was Gilmore Girls.

The idea for this story occurred to me several years ago, about the time I started watching Gilmore Girls. It’s a drama about the terrorism of power and the power of terrorism, with a good bit of funny thrown in to make it bearable. It throws political correctness to the wolves, and it lets the wolves loose on our preconceived notions of who are the good guys and bad guys. It’s about cybercrime and justice. It’s about people with power, who need a conscience and, much to their horror, get one. It’s Zorro meets Alias meets Boston Legal.

I have to put it this way, referring to TV shows, because it’s not like any novel ever written. Yes, it may someday be published as a series of novels, but it’s written like a television drama and distributed like a blog. The concept started as a short story. Then it expanded to a novella. Then maybe a novel. It would have been my first full novel. The problem is, this story demands much more than that. And the bigger problem is that you can’t make a good living as a novelist. (Unless you’re Stephen King.) And I have a family to support. So the “great American novel” approach was right out.

But I needed to watch Gilmore Girls first, because before I could succeed at this project, I needed to learn everything Gilmore Girls had to teach me about how to tell a story. And now that Gilmore Girls is complete and I’ve watched each episode 7 times—and analyzed to death the storytelling techniques Amy Sherman-Palladino uses—I think I can give this story the chance it deserves. I strive to imbue this series with the same level of quality she did Gilmore Girls. This will be the first story I’ve written on this scale. In a way, Gilmore Girls is the role model to which this story aspires.

But there’s more. In the years since Gilmore Girls started, the Internet has developed ways to distribute a serial drama, ways that weren’t feasible back then. Blogger and Drupal were still in their infancies. WordPress didn’t exist yet. Now, however, blogging sites are so common, most people read blogs without even realizing it. This is important, because a blog is how you distribute serial content on the Internet. Combine that with how far print-on-demand has come in the past 7 years, and the time is right to try something that—as far as I know—has not yet been done on the Internet.

The Conscience of Abe’s Turn will be distributed as an online dramatic series of posts. I’ll post a chapter each week (more or less). Every 5 chapters will make up an “episode.” That’s about a novella’s worth. And 8 episodes will make up a “season.” That’s about a novel’s worth, in about a year. After each season, I hope to release a printed edition—like the DVD set for a TV show.

Right now I’m planning out the characters and story, creating the story bible. Believe it or not, this is half the battle of creating a series like this, because once you have the story planned out, you know what’s going to happen each week.

I hope to premier the series by August. But subscribe now, and I’ll post occasional status updates and previews here.

-TimK