I had the strange experience last week of making an argument for my dream job — or, at least, one of my dream jobs. It was something that spun out of a phone call with an editor, and me beginning that argument during the call; they said something along the lines of, “I’ve never heard you so fired up! Why don’t you write something up and we’ll see what happens?” and it was off to the races.
The reason I’m sharing this isn’t that I think it’ll happen; just the opposite, given the way that so much of this year has worked out when it comes to career opportunities. But, really, just the act of sitting down and writing out what is more or less a pitch for, “this is what I want to be doing with my career, and this is why I think that you, unknown decision maker who has to think about if this is financially viable, should agree with me,” is a dizzying, surreal experience. Think of it as the old idea of singing for your supper, but with a component of having to consider how the supper and the song fits into the listener’s overall business plans.
The even stranger thing is, this wasn’t the first time that I’ve had to do something like this in the last couple of months. As I try to consider what shape my writing career is going to take in the next few months to a year — if I’m going to continue to have a writing career of any note — I’ve had to write more than one attempt at pitching myself and my plans. As someone who hates talking about themselves and coming across as anything resembling confident, it’s a skill that I’m still working on learning, but one that I arguably should have had years ago.
I’ll find out if this latest argument was convincing in a few weeks, I suspect. Like I said, I doubt that it truly will be, given the evidence so far, but I’m willing to be surprised one more time, just in case.