Single Servings by Ad Hamilton: Project Premise

Single Serving Fiction

By Ad Hamilton

I am a frequent flier. Aside from airline crews and the military, there are few Americans who log as many T+L’s as me. About eight in an average week. I purchase magazines entirely in terms of flight segments required to consume all relevant content. New Yorker=1 segment. Harper’s=2, Economist=3. Novels, and anything else greater than 4 segments, I can only engage on vacations. What’s the outcome if the production of writing is similarly constrained? Single-serving stories.

A parallel investigation is environmental. I became convinced, in architecture school, that my work was different from that of my colleagues, in part because while everyone else in the building listened to music, I listened to talk radio (I can’t do anything with music on). I wonder how my work is changed, how it’s impaired, by altitude, by claustrophobia, and by fear. By writing on planes. At approximately nine minutes from wheels-up, FAA regulations allow the use of non-networked devices. This permission is then rescinded about twelve minutes before landing. From the first announcement to the second, on each segment I fly, I try like hell to write something. I only write on my Verizon Blackberry.

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Trained as an architect and urban planner, the author is a Charlotte-based developer of golf, equestrian, and active-senior communities.

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“Single Servings” is a project by Ad Hamilton that will appear on The Owls site.