When I first got the idea for Boiling Point I was working as an intern at National Public Radio in the first 5 months of the Clinton administration in 1993. A lot of my duties involved going down into the library and researching. At one point I ran across a book called ‘The Nine Nations of North America” by Joel Garreau. It talks about the cultural unity of different regions of the continent that have nothing to do with state or national borders.
So I started writing a story of events that take place leading to the breakup of the US. I was also partly inspired by the breakup of the once monolithic Soviet Union. I actually made a map in pencil and changed the borders as I wrote out the story. What I wrote eventually served as a back story for a series of radio broadcasts I created called Nations. I thin wrote Boiling Point around those radio scripts.
I intend to put all this stuff up on the site. The first thing I have up is the back story. I have modified it slightly from the original to give it more depth and clarity, but it’s essentially just a history of the United States during the breakup. Read it here.