About the novel, Nation of Airports
What it's about What's online Or, just read it!
I'm writing a novel called Nation of Airports. It's a love story between business travelers, one who works for Heaven and one for Hell.
Let's look at that previous sentence.
I'm writing: Painfully slowly. Nation of Airports is eleven years old. It began as an idea for a screenplay, until a few Los Angeles parties made it clear that while I enjoy movies, I don't want to write for film. I'm a prose writer, and the only possible way this story will ever be on screen is if I write it as a good book and someone buys the rights.
After a year of notes, I started formal work on the novel in 1999. I wrote 400 pages, until my mom's long dying, my own creative problems, and a difficult time with a few other aspects of my life all left me dry and discouraged for two full years. When I returned to the book in 2004, I started to read those 400 pages and gave up. They were fat, not just with helping verbs and wiggle words like "seemed" and "almost" and "very." Real fat is a symptom of unused muscles, lazy habits, clogged arteries. I needed to start over. What you'll find on this website is the new draft, and I like it better.
a novel called Nation of Airports: I know I'm late to the party on this one. For every Harry Potter and Dan Brown who brings some serious literary noise, it's obvious that no one reads anymore. I have my own opinion on the reason for this, and it has nothing to do with the current triumph of image-based arts.
Put simply, I think the sensibility of most writers hasn't kept up with the spread of literacy, and the hoary lit-class dictum of "write what you know" is entirely too influential now. Literacy is global but most writing is maddeningly local. William S. Burroughs often said that writing was fifty years behind painting, and it's taken me a while to finally see what he meant. Most books I read now strike me as landscape paintings, well-executed but dull, and while perhaps not as dated they seem hardly different from the books that went before. The last non-genre novel that made me feel I was in a more engaging place than I myself could visit was Ann Patchett's Bel Canto, and even she had to put all her many different characters into one building.
I'm trying to write something lively and more in tune with this big globalized multicultural future-shock world I live in. My novel is set in Washington, Lake Tahoe, London, San Francisco, Rome, Aberdeen, Munich, Prague, Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Chicago. I hope that when time-pressed readers look for a trip out of their own lives, mine will prove the more exciting tour.
It's a love story: It's not a romance novel, at least by the strict rules of the genre. For one thing, the characters won't even meet until halfway through the book. The real story, though, is about love, but it's not about happy love making everything ok with one's life. Perhaps -- I won't know until I finish -- it's about how you have to compromise and even give up things you like to keep love, things that the love itself will never fully replace.
between business travelers: I have some experience of this. I worked for AOL overseas for all told about twenty months in Europe and Asia. Some of that experience informs the book. I think the business traveler is an interesting figure, someone neither at home nor a part of his current locale. Maybe not a tourist - maybe even less than a tourist, someone in a modern cloister with carpeting and nice beds and room service, a strange global habitrail where both nothing and much is at stake.
one who works for Heaven and one for Hell: I really think of the institutions behind my protagonists (see, right there: one of them works for evil yet she's certainly not the antagonist) as good and evil. I suppose the problem, or one of the problems I want to work with, is that both Heaven and Hell -- which is what at least 30% of my fellow humans expect to find after they die -- are top-down hierarchies run by centralized planning. They are medieval imaginings, and vastly less complex organizational systems than the real world that science and economics and art reveal to us every day. Even as business models they're discredited. I find it hard to believe that any beings so much greater than we are would be so simple, when even beings vastly lesser than we, such as bacteria, keep surprising us with their complexity.
While Straightforward Consulting and the Empyrean Group are certainly fantastic, they're not allegorical, and they don't have an exclusive market (or even greatest marketshare) on their products. I have a sort of cosmology worked out, but I hope to keep it to a couple of pages.
I also wanted to examine some ideas, certainly humanist and possibly spiritual, developed during my work and travels in Asia. I had a vague notion of a correlative between two transitions -- that the social change from a colonialist Old/New/Third world culture to a globalist, ever-integrating culture mirrors the spiritual change from Western notions of moral opposites to an Eastern sense of the whole.
To go toward such massive themes, I need a lighthearted approach, and a breezy tale of life in transit makes an appealing story. Ideally, I want to capture the weird habitrail of international business, from hotels to airport shuttles to 14-hour flights on the upper deck and more hotels, all very serious and insulating but plush. I also hope kids reared on Harry Potter and Buffy will like a little supernatural in their adult reading.
It's been very difficult for me to figure out how best to put my book online. My first attempts were discouraging. I felt both burdened and trapped by the online content, unable to go backwards and make changes.
After trying different ways of posting, I've decided to offer only the first two chapters in complete form. Chapter 2 needs some trimming
If you want to read more, write me.