The return: Cat-walking in Brooklyn Heights, Craigslist creative postings and
I left Beijing a few weeks ago. Now I am in the US (and after a few successively larger zoom-ins), Brooklyn Heights, on Henry Street.
The neighborhood doesn't harbor fairy tales, like Venice. Instead, walking along the eroded pavement and stout brick walls of local churches, I'm constantly reminded, of an old, dignified British man smoking his pipe and drinking his tea in the back of a library smothered in leather-bound books.
After one month, I am beginning to comfortably settle into a few habits. I have explored 4 different paths to and from the closest Barnes and Nobles and classified each one according to weather, my clothing and emotional ups and downs. I have located two supermarkets. I use the cheapest one for my daily shopping and plan to use the more expensive one on days of celebration. Finally, I have recorded an alley of clean, large store front windows that offer ample space to run a discreet fashion check-up as I walk past. I feel like a cat, slowly getting her bearings in a new living-room.
But life needs more than comforting habits, it needs structure under the form of imperatives. For most people, those imperatives mainly come down to one thing: money. I am slowly coaxing my daily activities to fasten around the green glitter of the idea. The first, because most rapidly implementable, of these activities is webdesign. In that respect, craigslist can be a blessing as well as a curse. Companies with extra employees will fodder them to the site, having them write different variations(mainly adding ";" or "@" or the favorite "*" here and there) on one ad theme to drown out the postings of private webdesigners.
The second activity, or aspiration is newspaper and magazine writing. I hardly dare to pronounce the words "freelance writer." Like topology mathematics, they are separated from me by an aura that humns "impossible", "impossible", "impossible" on a descending minor scale. And yet, I decided to dip my toe in the water.
Before I did though, I over-prepared myself: a long day at Barnes and Nobles reading self-help books on Freelance writing. I would recommend Freelance Writer by Moira Anderson Allen. She offers in depth tips on how to pitch articles along with real examples of follow up emails. Her writing is catchy and makes you visualize your chances of becoming a freelance writer increasing at the same rate as the pages turn.
At toe's deep level, everything is going pretty well. My previous articles for the New York Times arts section rewarded me with a freelance opportunity for the Asia Times (www.atimes.com). My first feature for them was accepted, it will be up on the site by Friday, and I have received my first assignment from the editor of the China section. Maybe at the beginning of next week, If I'm in particularly high spirits I'll try for the big fish of the pond: Time Asia, Newsweek, the Smithsonian. And maybe if my spirits are particularly high, at the end of the year, I'll pitch to the New Yorker. But for the moment, these are big fish in the pond of my wild dreams.
