So I became a freelancer 100% as of February of this year. For awhile I was scrambling around for work and I wanted to take everything that came my way. I quickly learned this was a bad idea, but not before a few interesting experiences.

Probably the most interesting involved doing re-told Bible stories for young adults. I was really appreciative that my friend had recommended them and I read through all of their extremely horrible instructional information soberly.

As part of the indoctrination, I then took a conference call with the CEO and their creative director. I really didn’t know what to expect, except that they would be telling me more about the project.

What I did know upfront is that for their version, they were changing the name of the snake to something like Scottie and having him tell fart jokes…in addition to tempting Eve and all. That probably should have tipped me off.

So I get on the phone and the creative director tells me right off the bat that he’s an ex-comics executive, in a ham-handed style right out of Used Car Salesman Don’ts, adding, “This ain’t like writing for your penny dreadfuls, Jeff. This is mainstream audience. This isn’t penny dreadful work, Jeff.”

Okay…what the hell is a penny dreadful, was my first thought. And where can I get me some of that?

Followed by: “You can’t go wrong if you just think of Adam as being like Batman, except without parents.”

Batman, without parents. Okay…

And then, this kicker: “Pitch me the Tree of Life, Jeff. Pitch me the Tree of Life.”

Me: “Pitch you the Tree of Life? Um…what?”

“Ya know, how would you deal with the Tree of Life.”

“Um. Mysterious. Unknowable. Dappled in sunlight?”

And it just went downhill from there.

I wound up not doing anything for them. But it was an instructional experience in freelancing. Most definitely.

Jeff

instructions for cooking avocado scrambled eggs

Delicious and easy breakfast: slice a soft avocado in half and remove the peel from the seedless half. (Put the other half in a plastic bag and store it in the refrigerator.) Put some olive oil in a frying pan and set the avocado-half, empty side up, in the pan. Crack an egg and pour the egg onto the avocado, containing as much egg as possible, particularly the yolk, in the avocado’s seed cavity. Turn the burner on. As the frying pan heats up, mash the avocado (and the egg in/on/around it) into a paste with a fork. Treat the resulting egg-avocado paste as you would regular scrambled eggs, sliding it around and so forth with a spatula.

When the avocado scrambled eggs have a delicate golden brown crust, turn the burner off. Lightly salt the avocado scrambled eggs. Sample a forkful; they should be crispy on the outside but soft, rich, and creamy within. It is best to eat them directly from the pan, while they are still hot.

My favorite line from The Moviegoer, Walker Percy’s classic novel of lust and longing in New Orleans, is this: “To become aware of the possibility of a search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.”

Which brings me to the Rickshaw Stop in San Francisco, tonight, where the writers who take the stage at Inside Storytime will be reading short pieces based on the theme Searching. In the lineup: Michael Disend, author of cult classic Stomping the Goyim; Barry Wildorf, author of Bring the War Home; Elizabeth Koch, who will be reading from The World Tour Compatibility Test; Roger Pinnell, and yours truly. I’ll be reading from my new San Francisco-centric novel The Year of Fog, which opens with the disappearance of a child on Ocean Beach. You can read the story behind the book here in the San Francisco Chronicle.

In addition to The Moviegoer, other books that come to mind when I think of “searching” are two older Ian McEwan novels: A Child in Time, and The Comfort of Strangers. For readers who came late to McEwan with the mainstream successes Atonement and Amsterdam, the two earlier novels might show you a side of McEwan you haven’t seen. Both are very short and deeply moody, and both are absolutely chilling.

New York Times: “Along the way, he discovered a fact that many small-scale recording artists are coming to terms with these days: his fans do not want merely to buy his music. They want to be his friend. And that means they want to interact with him all day long online. They pore over his blog entries, commenting with sympathy and support every time he recounts the difficulty of writing a song. They send e-mail messages, dozens a day, ranging from simple mash notes of the “you rock!” variety to starkly emotional letters, including one by a man who described singing one of Coulton’s love songs to his 6-month-old infant during her heart surgery. Coulton responds to every letter, though as the e-mail volume has grown to as many as 100 messages a day, his replies have grown more and more terse, to the point where he’s now feeling guilty about being rude.” (via Jenny D)

This is priceless. This blog has become my favorite nonfiction novel.