Sometimes you do things people totally don’t get. Like, why would Jake Noszaly ever not fly first class? Why would you conceivably not fly first class London-LA? Something you discovered by accident, if you fly Virgin Atlantic, Premium Economy, Upper Deck, 76A, phantom passenger in 76B, it’s very very very very quiet and you have 13 straight hours to work. So you buy two seats in Premium Economy to guarantee the phantom, you prebook 76AB, you put down the arm rest. You like the anonymity of quasi-economy, you like the way the seats remind you of a movie theatre on a slow afternoon. You don’t need to lie down because you don’t want to waste the 13 straight hours on sleep, 13 hours without a break, no calls, no e-mails, just food, drink, hot towels. You once wrote a screenplay by taking 4 LA-London London-LA flights back to back. You once wrote a screenplay by taking Amtrak down to San Antonio and then back to LA and then back to San Antonio because you’d worked out a fix and then back to LA and then you could probably have finished it at home but it felt so good, sitting on the train with the smooth juddering of the wheels on the tracks, the serendipitous fragments of conversation, you went with your instincts and just got on the next train back to San Antonio. People thought you were nuts. When you’re writing you don’t want to talk to people.