A Thousand Miles to San Francisco

A Thousand Miles to San Francisco is a novel currently being written by Ryan Nurse. Set in July 2012, it follows Denver resident Samantha Smith, who embarks on a cross-country journey of self-discovery in the aftermath of the Aurora cinema shooting. Nurse started writing the novel in December 2012, and as of July 2015, very little has been written, with Nurse noting that he is "nervous" about writing the story due to its sensitive subject matter.

Plot
Samantha Smith is a 22-year-old woman from Denver, Colorado, who works as a data analyst for a financial company. She has lived her whole life in the city and has never left the Denver-Aurora metropolitan area. One night, her best friend Dawn invites her to a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises, but Samantha declines as she would have work the next morning. The morning after the screening, Samantha finds out that the cinema had been attacked by a gunman, with twelve people dead and dozens injured. Horrified, she frantically searches for information about Dawn and discovers that she is alive, but wounded and at a nearby hospital. After visiting Dawn, Samantha, rattled by the thought that she could have been present at the massacre, decides to venture outside of Denver for the first time and drive to San Francisco, where her late grandmother had once lived.

Characters

 * Samantha Smith: The central character of the story, who embarks on a journey of self-discovery after her best friend is shot and wounded.
 * Dawn Harvey: Samantha's best friend, who is wounded in the Aurora shootings. She helps Samantha to realize that life is too short to spend in an office building.
 * John Carpenter: A trucker who helps Samantha out after her car breaks down.

Development
Nurse first conceived A Thousand Miles to San Francisco in December 2012, as a "driving movie" about an office worker who "grows bored of her monotonous daily routine" and sets out on a cross-country drive across America. Nurse selected Denver as the journey's starting point after consulting a list of America's most-populated cities, and selected San Francisco as the end point by scrolling west from Denver on Google Maps and seeing where he ended up. The distance between Denver and San Francisco is in fact 949 miles as the crow flies, and at least 1200 miles by car, rather than the more poetic-sounding "thousand miles" given in the title.

Nurse decided on using the Aurora shooting as the catalyst for Samantha's journey after realizing that it was adjacent to Denver, and that anchoring the novel to a real-world event would help give it a more defined chronology. However, he was anxious about incorporating such a tragic real-world event, and this caused his writing to stall for some time. Samantha's motivation for choosing San Francisco as her destination - her desire to see the sea for the first time - was chosen after Nurse realized that she could plausibly have never seen it before; this was later refined to include her grandmother having formerly lived there in order to explain why she chose San Francisco specifically over any other coastal city (for example, Los Angeles, which is over 100 miles closer).

When Samantha introduces herself to John Carpenter, he remarks "Like the little ambassador girl?", before introducing himself as "John Carpenter. Like the movie director." Neither character had been named after their famous namesakes, but upon learning of the coincidences, Nurse incorporated them into the dialogue.

As of 21 July 2015, three posts have been written for the novel as part of Project 20:15.