Howard Gordon, 49, planned to write his first novel decades ago. But when he graduated from Princeton, he started work in television. His success, on shows like ‘The X-Files,’ ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ and ’24,’ put the idea of a book on a back burner. For more than 20 years. The 2007 writers’ strike finally left Gordon with ‘lots of time and no more excuses,’ he says. Given his profile as a television writer and producer, including a 2006 Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series for ’24,’ his agent had already expressed interest in a book. So Gordon went to work, completing about 150 pages of the political and action thriller ‘Gideon’s War’ before the strike was resolved. Getting to the finish line was tough, forcing Gordon to ‘write in the margins of my time’ while working on the final season of ’24.” He found the process ‘much more intimate, much more controlled’ than television. ‘TV is a very collaborative medium, not just the writing, but the whole storytelling process,’ which includes input from a team of other writers and producers, as well as actors, cinematographers, composers, stunt coordinators and other crew members. ‘I get lots of satisfaction’ out of my television career, Gordon says. But ‘being a producer is such a negotiation.’ He felt a sense of freedom negotiating with only himself on ‘Gideon’s War.’ However, when facing the terror of the blank page, ‘there are fewer people to lean on,’ Gordon says. ‘Gideon’s War’ tells a tale of nonstop action, not even giving its protagonist, Gideon Davis, a chance to get out of his tuxedo before he is pulled from a meeting at the United Nations, choppered to New Jersey and then flown to a fictional Southeast Asian sultanate. The behind-the-scenes diplomatic negotiator has less than 48 hours to save his brother, Tillman, accused of being a ruthless terrorist leader. The effort leads Gideon scrambling through provinces full of armed insurgents, burned-out rain forest villages and, ultimately, onto an oil rig in the South China Sea, dodging bullets, deep-sea diving and crawling out of helicopter crashes along the way. For once, the writer could tell a story without worrying about the production costs. ‘There’s something very liberating about being able to blow up an oil rig and not worry about ‘How am I going to do that on this budget?” Gordon says. The action sequences allowed him to flex some of the same muscles he used on ’24,’ but what really motivated him was the story of the two brothers. The oldest of three boys, the writer was interested in the intellectual battle between his two fictional brothers’Gideon, committed to nonviolent diplomacy, and Tillman, who believes force is a more effective tool. ’Gideon’s War’ ‘tells my story in an alternate universe,’ Gordon says, when asked if the book is at all autobiographical. ‘He’s absolutely a stand-in for me in some ways.’ Gordon, ‘a voracious reader of foreign policy journals,’ was attracted to Princeton because of its Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. In addition to his aspirations as a novelist, he once thought about working at the State Department. He started working on a sequel to the book last summer. It focuses on ‘domestic terrorism and what it means to be an American’ and he’s excited about digging deeper into the characters of the two brothers. He’s also busy on two separate pilots, one called ‘REM,’ just underway for NBC, and the second, ‘Homeland,’ in the editing stages for Showtime. The latter, with Claire Danes, Mandy Patinkin and British actor Damian Lewis, follows a Marine, presumed dead in the first invasion of Iraq, who is found 10 years later in a safe house in Afghanistan. He returns, Rip Van Winkle-like, to his life, hailed as a hero by most, but suspected by Danes as a traitor. Gordon lives with his wife Cami (to whom he dedicated the book) and three children, aged 17, 16 and 6, in the Palisades Highlands. Cami is also a writer and environmental activist, co-author of ‘The Down-to-Earth Guide to Global Warming,’ with Laurie David. Gordon will discuss and sign copies of ‘Gideon’s War’ at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, February 25, at Village Books, 1049 Swarthmore.
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