This June, I took my family: husband, two kids, young nephew, and sister on a road trip through Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada and South Dakota to visit all-American tourist sites like the Grand Canyon and Mount Rushmore as well as former sites of nuclear warhead storage and testing. The vacation was tweeted live here. Documentation from the trip including hours of GPS-located video from a Virb attached to our minivan window and Google Glass will be used in my next transmedia novel Tiny Drops.

Tiny Drops is an exploration of national identity and our perceptions of time and space in an ever globalized and virtual world. Based on a true story, it tells the tragi-comic story of a Japanese housewife kidnapped by North Korean frogmen off a beach where she is vacationing with her family and taken to Pyongyang to teach a beautiful half-Japanese, half-Korean operative how to “be” Japanese.

The novel will be “housed” in four customized tours through Google Earth (America, South Korea, North Korea and Japan). “Atomic Vacation”: part game, part Cold War archive will be the first. My collaborator, interactive designer Cyril Tsiboulski has agreed to do visual and interactive design for this project. I am actively seeking developers to work on the coding aspects of the project. Contact me at iszilak@gmail.com if you are interested.