Award-winning Author Pens Ghostly TV SeriesThe Gloaming introduces a world of ghosts, ghouls...and quantum theory
Award-winning Bay Area author, Helen Stringer, tackled some of these questions in her middle-grade fantasy novels, Spellbinder and The Midnight Gate, as well as the novelette, The Blood Binding. But writing the award-winning science fiction novel, Paradigm, inspired her to think about ghosts in a new way, a way that combined the world of spirits with that of science. And so The Gloaming was born. The Gloaming will not be a new book, however. Instead, it will be a web series structured like Classic Doctor Who, with six 20-minute episodes. While this may seem like a radical departure from writing novels, for Stringer it’s more of a return to her first love: film. In addition to being a novelist, she is also an award-winning filmmaker, having attended the AFI’s prestigious film school as a Directing Fellow, before going on to work in television in Los Angeles. “I see all my stories like movies in my head,” she explains. “So I thought that this time I’d bring fans right inside my personal theatre.” Stringer explains that The Gloaming looks at the world of the dead in a more space/time way - creating a universe in which ghosts are real, but not as you might expect. More trans-dimensional and less ethereal. Stringer points out that science has always been a presence in her life, thanks to her father, who was a prominent research scientist at the Electric Power Research Institute in Palo Alto, and her sister, a microbiologist who worked for many years doing cancer research before taking her skills in a new direction by opening a brewery. “My father was also a lifelong scifi fan,” she says. “The kind of person who was curious about absolutely everything. He also had a hilarious mischievous streak that my sister and I both inherited and which pops up in everything I write.” A few years ago, Stringer’s father was diagnosed with an accelerated form of dementia, and watching the deterioration of such a great intellect also played a role in the development of The Gloaming. “I kept on talking to him as if he was okay,” she explains. “As if the part of him that was really him, was still there, somewhere in the room, waiting.” After he passed away, she began to work on the story of a scientist who discovers that the worlds of the paranormal and those of scientific investigation are not incompatible, but intertwined. Research for creating this new world consisted chiefly in reading about quantum physics, and the various theories of space/time. “It almost made my head explode,” she says, laughing. The first episode of the series will be shot in February, and Stringer is raising financing for it through Kickstarter. “The Gloaming is such a different take on the traditional ghost story that I thought shooting the first episode as a kind of “proof of concept” would help people understand the story we are trying to tell,” says Stringer. “Obviously, there’s a risk in supporting a single episode, so there is a special reward for everyone who pledges $40 or more – they get to become beta-viewers.” She explains that “beta-viewers” The Gloaming Kickstarter campaign runs through November 20th. https://www.kickstarter.com/ http://www.thegloaming.tv http://www.helenstringer.net http://www.amazon.com/-/ End
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