Job Hurt #1:

I've decided, after a little positive feedback from some friends, to begin chronicling my quest for an entry-level editorial assistant position in NYC. Now to those unfamiliar with this specific industry, it may sound like a silly goal and you may be asking yourself - how hard could it be to find such a job?

Excruciatingly difficult is the answer. And that is for the EA jobs at academic and commercial fiction publishers - the vaunted ones (more literary or journalistic periodicals and publishers) are entirely impossible to land. A friend of mine who is in the same hard position as me once compared the pursuit for an editorial assistant job in NYC to attempting to break into Hollywood. This is an accurate comparison - only with the latter you get showered with luxuries and your sole responsibility is to act, with the former you get put in a small cubicle space with a pile of dozens of manuscripts (about 500 pages each) and told to have reader's reports on all of them by the end of the day. And that is what I desperately wish to be doing for the next twenty years of my life.

Every weekday morning for the past five months I awake and immediately search several websites which I have bookmarked in a folder called 'to find a job...'. Today I did just that and there is nothing. No job postings anywhere for editorial assistants. NY Magazine is hiring interns, but do I really want to be an intern again? I have had four internships. No, I do not want to be an intern again.
So I will spend the day reading, perhaps at a park that I will ride to on my bike, and then I will go to my restaurant job in the evening and serve people who can afford to spend thirty dollars on three glasses of wine and pretend I'm happy to be helping them relax when I'm actually frantically doing math in my head to find out if I will make enough to pay my student loan bill this month. (They make you pay those even if you are unemployed.)

Just the other day in fact, a young woman in a pretty white-and-black dress sat down at a table and slung a black tote with the Penguin logo on the back of her chair. I immediately wanted to find a way to start a conversation with her, but it seemed completely inappropriate, and unless she worked in HR it wouldn't do me any good as I already know lots of people at Penguin.

In fact, I know lots of people at several places (the plus side of having had four internships) and still, I have no job. I have dozens of contacts and plenty of experience and there is no job on my horizon. Welcome to Hollywood.