TV's Tom Abrahams writes Sedition novel

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Before she left for KNSD 7 NBC San Diego, former KHOU 11 anchor Christine Haas wrote a book. Now another Houston TV anchor, a few clicks up the dial, has plunged into the book world.

Weekend anchor/reporter Tom Abrahams has written Sedition. Here is a synopsis:

"The President of The United States is dead. There is no Vice President to take his place. As the nation slips into a constitutional crisis, a small group of disenfranchised neo-patriots conspire to violently seize power. They have the will. They already have someone on the inside. And they have the explosives."

Abrahams wrote the modern day political thriller based on the 1820 British plot, The Cato Street Conspiracy.

I'm always interested when someone with a full-time career writes a novel. Here are some questions I had for Abrahams.

Mike McGuff: Why did you want to write a book?

Tom Abrahams: I love writing. I like telling stories and getting reaction from those who read them. I got into the news business, in part, because I could write every day. I always knew it was a matter of time before I committed to writing something long form and actually wrote a crime novel in the late 1990s. It wasn't very good. Then I started and stopped with various manuscripts over the years until I found the right story, the right genre. And this was it.

MM: How different is writing a television news script from a book?

TA: TV news writing is very succinct. At its best it gets to the point quickly, hits the highlights, and lets the video (or audio) carry the story. A book needs more color. There's no video or audio to fill in the blanks. I actually found myself having to work really hard to add little details that I normally would leave out. But both are better when edited and rewritten multiple times. In news we'll cut a 2 minute story to 1:30. In SEDITION, I cut it from 106,000 words to about 90,000.

MM: How much discipline did it take to write it with a full-time job?

TA: It takes more discipline than I regularly have. A lot of authors will write every day. I can't do that. I'll write in chunks, when I can squeeze it in. It took me 7 months to write SEDITION and another 9 months to rewrite and edit. The most time consuming part, however, wasn't the writing. The tremendous amount of research I did to ground the story in realism took the most amount of effort.

You can buy the book at seditionbook.com in various formats.