In particular, I need to test with the major handheld devices that Mobipocket Reader supports:

• Palm OS
• Blackberry
• PocketPC
• Symbian

If you have one of these devices and you’d like to read (or at least to flip through) a free copy of The Conscience of Abe’s Turn (Season 1, Volume 1), please comment here or email me, and I’ll have a download link sent to you.

I’d also love it if someone could test with the Amazon Kindle. As I understand it, you simply have to upload the file to the Kindle using a USB cable, but I don’t know anything about the process. In particular, I’m a little unclear as to whether the ebook must have DRM in it. (My ebooks are not DRM-crippled, because DRM causes more problems than it solves, and it doesn’t even stop copying.)

-TimK

Legend has it that magician Jasper Maskelyne orchestrated a number of grand illusions during World War II, in order to foil the Germans and help the Allies, including vanishing the Suez Canal. But Stokes research has cast doubts on many of these purported accomplishments. Stokes’ goal is to question the Maskelyne legacy as an historian, but he ends up also providing a fascinating (to me) set of facts for ideas for my own fictional story.

I haven’t read through the entire site yet, but I’m thinking: This is so cool! Ted is a student of magic and an amateur magician. He is about to become a founding member of the Conscience. Maybe his knowledge of the principles of illusion will be valuable to the team.

In fact, this is the type of thing I’ve been doing with the story, increasing the complexity of the espionage tactics the Conscience will need to use. Right now, they’re still unformed, and Clyde, God love her, is behaving like the amateur she is. Michael will pull her together, though. (Michael has a secret, in case you haven’t figured that out.) And now Ted has more than the obvious to contribute.

-TimK

Just a quick note: The J. Timothy King Web Shop is up and running and taking orders for The Conscience of Abe’s Turn, Volume 1 (with special, introductory pricing through election day, November 4) and 1001 Character Quirks for Writing Fiction: A tool for creating memorable fiction characters (with the ebook version included).

And through October 14, everything in the store is 5% off, if you use the following coupon code on the checkout screen:

GRANDOPENING
5% OFF everything
Valid through Oct 14, 2008
only at shop.JTimothyKing.com

Soon, I’ll also be releasing my father’s memoir, Can You See God in This Picture: A Letter to My Sons Making Sense of 25 Years as a Pastor. And I also have other projects in the pipeline.

-TimK

(Note that only one coupon code can be used per order.)

Note that I’m going to be giving away a limited number of copies of the book. But if you want one, you need to pre-register now!

Enjoy!
-TimK

P.S. WARNING: The following snippet contains gratuitous profanity. Not much of it, but a little. I generally hate gratuitous profanity. But In the spirit of Penn & Teller: Bullshit!, I use strong language and dirty-name-calling, because I want to say what I really think without being sued. Because if you call someone a liar or a philanderer, he can sue you, even if it’s true. But if you call him a d***head jerk, that’s just your opinion, and it’s protected free speech.

May I Feel Your Pain?

I tell people, I miss Bill Clinton. I mean, yeah, people accused him of being a liar and a philanderer and a cheat, and he certainly was a dickhead and a jerk and—worst of all—a politician. But despite all that, Bill Clinton was so much fun to laugh at:

I did not have sexual relations with that woman… I never told anybody to lie, not a single time, never. These allegations are false. And I need to go back to work for the American people.

Years later, that speech is still being posted to YouTube. And it still sets me rolling on the floor, laughing! I firmly believe that G.W. Bush would make a better president, if only he had one good intern.

And the laughs continue. Even James Bovard’s scathing treatise on Clinton-era government abuses, Feeling Your Pain: The Explosion and Abuse of Government Power in the Clinton-Gore Years, makes me guffaw. And not all the humor, I think, Bovard intended.

“Pet Pork Politics,” Linda Braucht
Prints available at Art.com

But Bovard ruins all the humor and starts talking about Waco, Ruby Ridge, Columbine, the Brady Act, Kosovo, Bosnia, Yugoslavia, the CDA (shot down by the Supreme Court), the Clipper Chip (and Clipper II, and Clipper III), Echelon, Waldemar and Loretta Watzlaff, Anna Ward, Ralph Garrison (may he rest in peace), Mario Paz (may he rest in peace), Willy Heard (may he rest in peace), Ismeal Mena (may he rest in peace)… and Bovard doesn’t even get to the COPA (a.k.a. the CDA II, recently ruled unconstitutional yet again, still being battled in the courts via “ACLU v. Reno II”—How’s that for a legacy?), the DMCA (which led to the arrest of Dmitry Sklyarov, later acquitted), Steve Jackson Games v. the Secret Service (which began during the preceding Bush years), the Amateur Action BBS raids (also crossing administrations), the Pensacola BBS raids, the Wiretap Bill, Jake Baker, Randal Schwartz (not federal, but during Clinton-Gore), Daniel Bernstein, Peter McWilliams (who finally died in 2000)…

The Bridge to the 21^st Century.

Of all these names, events, programs, and laws, you probably recognize only a portion. For every stupid and despicable thing our government does with our tax money that you’ve heard about, there are dozens that you probably haven’t.

Clinton was well out of office before I even made a first cut at The Conscience of Abe’s Turn, but I can’t help think that these events shaped the primordial inspiration for the story.

The bullshit continued after Clinton, of course. The federal government thugs’ no-knock, midnight raid against Elian Gonzalez. The USA PATRIOT Act. Osama bin Laden. Afghanistan. Iraq. Off-shore torture. Habeas corpus.

But Bush hasn’t provided the comedic folly of the Clinton years. Let’s face it: National paranoia and U.S. bombings and arrest and torture just aren’t funny. Even Hawkeye never joked about them, just about the incompetence that caused them. And I find myself unable to bring myself even to that. How does one put a funny face on pure evil? 

(It becomes Batman’s Joker, that’s how.) 

And then dissent became “unpatriotic” and even effectively illegal in some settings. 

And so I faded from politics. I just couldn’t handle it anymore. My problem is that I’m not a politician. I don’t have that psychopathy gene that allows one to stand passionately on a subject and not really mean it, to violently change millions of personal lives without regret because it’s just part of the job, to denigrate one’s opponents and then figure it’s just politics. My problem is that I actually care. 

My spirit prevented me from following Bush’s follies the same way I did Clinton’s, because I needed the light absurdity to distract me from the utter seriousness of it all, the fact that some innocent people do indeed get caught in the pitiless gears of the government machine. 

However, Abe’s Turn provides an outlet for my disapproval, my sadness, and my fears. It provides an outlet for my disapproval, because I get to say, in the voices of my characters, what I really think about the police state. It provides an outlet for my sadness, because these characters feel the same sadness. And it provides an outlet for my fears, because anyone who has been following police-loophole bullshit legislation over the past 20 years, the villain of Abe’s Turn, Sam Baedes, does and will commit the same abuses, if he deems it necessary to “maintain order.” Still I will resist employing Michael’s sardonic pun. I will not call him “Beady-eyes.”

Moreover—perhaps more importantly—Abe’s Turn provides hope. It says, maybe the good guys can win. True, the story of Abe’s Turn is implausible, impractical fiction. So what? I’m sick and tired of popular stories in which we the proletariat are forever doomed to a life of subservience to the political will. I need hope, even if a vain hope.

Abe’s Turn enables me to expose myself to politics again. In recent weeks, I’ve even found that I like it again, that I can even stand reading about Bush’s wars, and I am able to feel wretched sickness, hot anger, despondent sadness, and still not be driven to insanity by it.

During the Clinton years, I discovered Harry Browne, running for president on the Libertarian Party ticket. Harry Browne didn’t get to see liberty in his lifetime, even though he believed in it. But I don’t want that hope to die. Hence, The Conscience of Abe’s Turn.

Too many novice writers–and more than a few professionals–have a wrong idea about genres. This wrong idea can hinder a writer, keep him from finding inspiration in what they write. He thinks that his genre defines his writing, that his writing “has” a genre.

But your writing is not what “your genre” is. Genres are just marketing categories. They help readers find books that they might like to read. They help readers know what to expect from your stories. They provide conventions that help readers “get” your stories. But they do not define the story itself. A story does not have a genre. Rather, a genre has stories.

So if your writing is not your genre, what is it? Your writing is you. And you are the most important element in what you write. That’s where inspiration, creativity, and uniqueness come in. And letting the you in your writing shine through is also what will keep your readers coming back again and again for more and more. Because it separates you out, makes you unique. If you just write to a genre, your writing is just a commodity, with nothing to distinguish it from the thousands upon thousands of other writers who are writing in that same genre. But the you in your writing makes you one of a kind.

Now, I’ve always found it quite easy to find the you in what I write. Finding the right genre, not so much. So it has been with The Conscience of Abe’s Turn. For now, I don’t want to get into what specifically inspired this story (though that is the subject of one of the bonus extras, a retrospective essay in the upcoming first volume of the story). Suffice it to say that this story comes from dealing with issues that matter deeply to me, and from true stories that have horrified me and angered me.

I’m left with the converse problem, then, to what many writers face. There’s so much of the you in Abe’s Turn–that is, it’s so unique–it’s hard to find the genre it belongs in. I’ve been talking about Abe’s Turn as “romance,” or maybe “romantic suspense.” But that’s not quite right. Abe’s Turn is not a strict romance novel, because it doesn’t follow the romance formula. But it is about relationships, so it’s in the romance category, broadly speaking. But it’s not just about love, friendship, and betrayal. It’s about crime and sex and violence and spies and underground organizations.

The “crime and sex and violence” thing is what disturbed me about categorizing it as “romance-suspense.” How do I categorize Abe’s Turn so that romance readers don’t get the impression that it’s another Nora Roberts rip-off? Similarly, I don’t want to categorize it as “crime,” because it doesn’t follow the familiar conventions of that genre. How do I categorize it so that crime readers don’t think that the cops are supposed to be the good guys? Yes, they are sometimes the good guys in Abe’s Turn. But frequently enough, despite good intentions, they end up being the bad guys. That breaks with the traditional crime novel.

Bones to the Rescue

Looking at the subject list for a recent Kathy Reichs “Temperence Brennan” novel… [Why Kathy Reichs. Because her novels have strong characters and they involve violence.] Some relevant subjects and categories are:

• American Mystery & Suspense Fiction
• Fiction – Espionage / Thriller
• Fiction / Suspense
• Fiction / Thrillers

“Espionage” and “thriller” are the keywords that caught my attention. Why didn’t I think of that before? Abe’s Turn is “espionage romance.” Who ever heard of such a thing?

Well, a quick search on Amazon.com for “espionage romance fiction” pulls up quite a few hits. But Abe’s Turn is not just espionage-romance fiction. It’s also libertarian fiction. On Amazon, “libertarian romance fiction” and “libertarian espionage fiction” both pull up hits. But it seems the first volume of Abe’s Turn is to be the very first “libertarian espionage romance fiction” novel ever to make it into Amazon’s computer system.

What’d'ya know about that?

-TimK

I’ve been ad-testing graphics and text, and this design represents one of the winning results. But I am continuing to ad-test it, until the final release.

This book is mostly a promotional vehicle, because there’s so much more I have in mind for this project. So expect to be able to get a copy on the cheap.

The Conscience of Abe’s Turn joins a list of 21’st-century fiction works that are available online via free download or audiobook podcast and are marketed using guerrilla marketing techniques, works like Mur Lafferty’s Playing for Keeps, Scott Sigler’s Infected, and Bicycle Shop Murder, by Robert Burton Robinson.

Stay tuned!
-TimK

P.S. The Conscience of Abe’s Turn is a libertarian crime-romance drama about a group of Gen-X civil-rights activists from the fictional town of Abe’s Turn. These 4 friends refuse to accept the injustice they see and experience. They come up with a dangerous solution that ultimately pits them against corrupt government officials in a precarious balance of power.