Novel Excerpt: Google Google

Google had already swallowed my life. Freelance journalists depend on that crazy program. We all have stories squirreled away just like lonely and elderly people squirrel away newspapers. Somewhere in our ratty brains, all of us writers hoard stacks of impossible stories that we found on Google.

Sitting around for two months of desperate unemployment last winter, I Googled enough wasted stories to last a lifetime—about rat lovers, anarchists, sex hypnotists, Christian videogame evangelists, Private detectives, and feeders that stuffed their girlfriends with so much food that their shirts burst. I gorged myself on information, shuffling through thousands of pages of feeder erotica, GI Joe fan fiction, and computer gadget websites looking for stories.

Looking for the next idea, and thinking that one idea could save me. I hung around my journalist friends, smiling and weighing my stuff against theirs; everybody’s always weighing future alliances and the probabilities of everything you might write. Everybody is always trying to figure out if you will ever escape this measly crew, and if you do, how far you will go.

This, I told myself, is the story that will save you. But the point was, I was starving.

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