As Georgia Flight sat down last Thursday to talk about “Black Hole Highway,” the science-fiction novel she released in May, her excitement at the thought of readers finally getting a look into the world she had created was palpable — and yet, she said, she is still getting used to the feeling of promoting it.
“I sat on it for a while,” she said. “I’ve always sort of been waiting for an Emily Dickinson situation — like, maybe eventually I’ll just die, and people will find it.”
We were sitting on the lower level of Homeport in Montauk, one of two stores she owns along with her husband, East Hampton Town Councilman Tom Flight, surrounded by books she had ordered for the store. “It’s our best-selling book of the summer so far — just in the store, though. So it’s doing better than I thought it would do, but I still would like it to reach more people.”
Ms. Flight began the novel two years ago as a creative outlet, and wrote it over the course of a year in one to two-hour sessions slipped into an already-packed schedule. She spends most of the year working as an English teacher at East Hampton High School — and tutoring students on the side — in addition to overseeing the two stores and raising three teenagers.
“I didn’t want to write something realistic,” she explained. “I feel like there’s enough of that, and I know what life is like. I want to really imagine something and just see where it goes.”
The novel tells the story of a young woman who finds herself traveling across the galaxy in a brown “space minivan,” and though much of the plot takes place in outer space, it begins and ends in Montauk, where Ms. Flight grew up and now lives.
She drew inspiration from stories like “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” and “Star Wars,” and the work of Kurt Vonnegut — whimsical, fun to read, and not weighed down by extensive passages of “dreary” world-building. “I love when you’re in a really weird situation and then mundane things are happening. Like, I just love thinking about space on a Tuesday, with food that isn’t very good. You know what I mean?”
“I wanted it to be conversational,” she continued. “I do slip in a little bit of vocabulary, because I can’t help it, because I’m an English teacher, but I didn’t want it to feel condescending to anyone, or like something you had to unpack. I just wanted it to be like I’m telling you a story.”
And although she described the work as more “fi” than “sci,” she ran her ideas by an actual rocket scientist, a friend from college who works for Jeff Bezos’s space technology company Blue Origin, who confirmed that the science “theoretically, kind of” made sense. “I was like, ‘All right, that’s all I need to hear.’ “
“Black Hole Highway” is the third novel Ms. Flight has completed, but the first she has wanted to release. The title was suggested by her 13-year-old son, and she had the completed manuscript professionally edited before self-publishing it through a company called IngramSpark, which gave her control over the book’s appearance while also getting it up on the Amazon and Barnes & Noble websites.
Though she already has ideas for a follow-up novel, she has no plans to quit her day job. “I love it. It’s so, so fulfilling,” she said of teaching. “It keeps my mind active, and I love teenagers. They’re so creative, and they always know what’s next. Their moods are unbearable, and they ask a lot of you, but I feel like I have energy to give to them.”
And, she pointed out, she has the summers off, and will be able to use that time to focus on her writing. “I certainly leave this one on a bit of a cliffhanger. I wrap up the current situation, but I also leave it with something else that is a big problem, and we need to kind of work on that.”
“I will definitely write another one if this gets enough attention — in fact, I will write another one even if nobody cares about this one, because I really am attached to my characters now, and I kind of want to see where they go.”