{"id":3304,"date":"2004-08-04T18:54:00","date_gmt":"2004-08-04T22:54:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/davidmcrampton.com\/?p=3304"},"modified":"2020-08-30T23:25:37","modified_gmt":"2020-08-31T03:25:37","slug":"writing-professionally-pt-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidmcrampton.com\/?p=3304","title":{"rendered":"Writing Professionally, Pt. 3"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><u>The Ann Arbor News<\/u> told me no.<br \/>\n<u>Pop<\/u> went under before it started.<\/p>\n<p>Let&#8217;s give <u>The Ann Arbor Paper<\/u> a shot.&nbsp; Resume, writing samples, and (anti)cover-letter are sent.&nbsp; I read their August issue, and was highly impressed by the writing quality and topics.&nbsp; Way impressed.&nbsp; Now I hope they want me.&nbsp; :)&nbsp; *crosses fingers*<\/p>\n<p><lj-cut text=\"Anti-cover letter begins here.\">To Whom it May Concern:<\/lj-cut><\/p>\n<p>Let me begin by saying that I despise cover letters.&nbsp; This letter is supposed to effectively communicate to you nearly all of my experience, talent, skill, creativity, and\/or other aspects that you are looking for in a writer.&nbsp; There&#8217;s an accepted structure to these things, and in looking for jobs I&#8217;ve become intimately familiar with how limiting and two-dimensional the information in a \u201cproper\u201d cover letter becomes.<\/p>\n<p>I could list my talents, tell you how familiar I am with your company, and inform you in bland corporation-speak exactly why I&#8217;m perfect to fill the open position.&nbsp; I could have barely glanced at an ad in an online job site or newspaper, gathered a minimum of information, and filled out a perfectly vague form letter.&nbsp; Then I could have hoped desperately for a positive response amongst filling out tens of the same for other positions.<\/p>\n<p>Instead, I&#8217;m letting you in on the frightening world of my personality, wit, and occasionally offensive nature.&nbsp; Up to the present, I&#8217;ve been a computer geek, both personally and professionally.&nbsp; I&#8217;ve become restless and dissatisfied, realizing that no matter how much you know, how many books, languages, and operating systems that you&#8217;ve mastered, you will most likely end up right back in telephone technical support, telling a customer to check and see if they&#8217;ve plugged their unit in.&nbsp; With that in mind, I&#8217;ve decided that my hobby should become my profession, and my profession should become my hobby.<\/p>\n<p>My first novel is completed, and is being edited before I send it out to prospective publishers.&nbsp; I&#8217;m turning some serial fiction that I&#8217;ve written into a comic book, with the help of several artist friends of mine.&nbsp; Then, I learned that the Ann Arbor Paper was hiring writers.&nbsp; After some agonizing about whether or not I was good enough, I am contacting you in the hopes that I will be what you need.&nbsp; My goals in this are straightforward.&nbsp; They include professional writing experience to aid me in my other writing endeavors, supplemental income, and exposing readers to something that is probably fairly unhealthy for them to read.&nbsp; Don&#8217;t worry, it&#8217;s only step one in my plot to take over the world.<\/p>\n<p>As requested on your web page, I have included two writing samples that I feel are appropriate to the open position.&nbsp; I&#8217;m interested in writing a regular column that addresses obvious, and possibly unsolvable, quirks in the life that I see around me.&nbsp; I&#8217;ve even thought of encouraging and replying to responses, basing future articles around feedback from readers.<\/p>\n<p>I can be contacted at my cellular phone at (734) xxx-xxxx, and have voice mail if I&#8217;m unable to talk.&nbsp; I can also be e-mailed at crampto3@&#8230;&#8230;..  Any feedback that you can provide would be well-received.&nbsp; Thank you for your time.<\/p>\n<p>Sincerely,<\/p>\n<p>Dave M. Crampton<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Ann Arbor News told me no. Pop went under before it started. Let&#8217;s give The Ann Arbor Paper a shot.&nbsp; Resume, writing samples, and (anti)cover-letter are sent.&nbsp; I read their August issue, and was highly impressed by the writing &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/davidmcrampton.com\/?p=3304\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[],"tags":[34,38],"class_list":["post-3304","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-livejournal","tag-quickie"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paQnES-Ri","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidmcrampton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3304","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidmcrampton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidmcrampton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidmcrampton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidmcrampton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3304"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/davidmcrampton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3304\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6244,"href":"https:\/\/davidmcrampton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3304\/revisions\/6244"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidmcrampton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3304"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidmcrampton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3304"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidmcrampton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3304"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}