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More Info—Washington Under Siege: Autumn of the Republic
Original 1990s Title: CON2: The Generals of October
In 1992, when I set out to write my first 'big' mainstream novel, I found a theme suitable to the grand political scheme I had in mind. In the U.S. Constitution, I spotted Article V, which deals with amending the Constitution. We can either amend it one little amendment at a time, which means sending the amendment around to each of the fifty states for them to separately approve it (by a 2/3 majority, very difficult to achieve); or we could theoretically also hold a convention and have all the states approve that one amendment. It's never been done. There has only been one Constitutional Convention, held amid much rancor and debate in Philadelphia during the long, hot summer of 1787. My novel is a warning: don't do it. Let's never have that CON2. The risks are too great.
Seven Days in May Inspiration. CON2 was my first major foray into the big novel. One of my all time favorites that inspired this novel was Seven Days in May (1962) by Fletcher Knebel and & Charles W. Bailey II. It was a bestseller, and made in to a successful movie by the same title (Seven Days in May) in 1964. Rod Serling, creator and narrator of The Twilight Zone, was commissioned to write the movie's screenplay. His same screenplay was resurrected in 1994 as a television movie titled The Enemy Within, starring Forest Whitaker and other top stars. Read more about my influences here: More Info
Other Inspirations. I wrote the first of five major drafts (each a total overhaul, so I really labored on CON2) in 1992. I've already mentioned Seven Days in May as a predecessor. At the time, I thought Seven Days in May was a bit far-fetched, sort of 1950s Red Scare paranoia, although today (2017) the Russian hack as a subplot to the Donald Trump nightmare should have resurrected Seven Days in May as it did George Orwell's 1984 and other political nightmares. Other dark political tales I greatly enjoyed, and recalled in launching CON2, included 1974's all-star (Warren Beatty et al) The Parallax View and James Grady's 1974 Six Days of the Condor which became the award-winning 1975 Robert Redford flick Three Days of the Condor. A funny story about Grady's book is that allegedly, his original manuscript was titled Sixteen Days of the Condor, but publisher W.W. Norton, aware of modern folks' short attention spans, decided a thriller couldn't take sixteen days so they shortened it to six. Film makers (Dino DeLaurentiis, Sydney Pollack) registered postively A.D.D. and shortened the film again to Three Days of the Condor.
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