Learning to Recognize an Opportunity

I've come to discover in this business that it's all about the culmination of little victories. It's rarely the case when you face a situation and think "Aha! I have now succeeded!" I've lost track of the times where I haven't even realized I've been given an opportunity until a few hours, or even days later. Sometimes, they're not so easy to recognize.

This week's example comes from a job-searching saga. I am still on the constant hunt to either add more and more freelance work to my plate or get a damn job already. A few weeks ago, when I came back from my Labor Day trip, I had a mini breakdown. It was one of those existential crises that I face every few weeks or so, where I question what the hell I'm doing with my life. I decided that I was going to try casting a wider net.

That night, I started looking for book publishing jobs and marketing jobs. (There might be something coming my way with marketing, actually, but since I'm superstitious, I don't want to jinx it by discussing it too much here prematurely.) I applied for an editorial assistant position at and independent literary agency, and mere minutes later, I got a response asking if I could interview later that week.

It was a phone interview at first. She would then pick a few candidates to come in for an in-person interview and go from there. For the first time in a long time, I actually felt as the interview was taking place that it was going really well. She compared me to Joyce Maynard and called me "a prolific writer." That had to be a good sign, right? Well, that weekend I got the worst kind of rejection.

She said that I was "tremendously impressive," and a "terrific writer," and that I was her top choice of the applicants, but she ended up hiring a former colleague who was looking for work and had more related experience. I was deeply upset. Hearing "You would've gotten it, but - " is never fun, and I bemoaned the fact, once again, that connections are everything.

I didn't even see the part at the end of the email where she offered me an informational interview. Once I finally read it, I didn't see the point. I agreed half-heartedly, mostly with the purpose of networking in mind. But then, slowly but surely, I began to understand that this was actually a great opportunity. A literary agent who I already know thinks I'm a great writer is taking time out of her busy day to buy me a coffee and sit down to talk.

For years, the idea of being an author has mostly been a pipe-dream. Of course, that's what I've always wanted to do, but I knew how difficult it was and so I turned towards becoming a magazine writer (because that's so easy) as a more realistic way of writing for a living. But now, all of a sudden, a meeting with an agent has fallen into my lap, an opportunity that my more literary friends would kill for. I'm not saying I'm expecting to come out of this meeting with an agent, nor am I expecting that even if I magically walked away with an agent that I would be published, but you know what? That's a possibility. And it's all because I didn't get a job I wanted.

One door closes...