Does volunteering still give people an edge on a resume? Years ago, it was viewed as a positive if someone volunteered in between jobs to show that he/she was making an effort to say busy. I volunteered at the Houston Food Bank once (not enough to put on a resume). If it makes any difference in a hiring manager's eyes, I may look for more ways to volunteer.
Does volunteering still give people an edge on a resume? Years ago, it was viewed as a positive if someone volunteered in between jobs to show that he/she was making an effort to say busy. I volunteered at the Houston Food Bank once (not enough to put on a resume). If it makes any difference in a hiring manager's eyes, I may look for more ways to volunteer.
What's with the job market here? I have a master's degree in public administration and two bachelors degrees. I have been in case management for 7 years, even owning my own company for 3 of those 7 years. I don't want to run another business. I've been applying for office roles, case management positions, supervisory roles, even some part-time stuff. I tailor my resume and cover letter, like you're supposed to do. But I am hardly getting any interviews. I'm getting automatically rejected for case manager positions, and I've done that for 7 years!
I've never had this much trouble securing employment. Not to sound pompous, I genuinely don't understand if my issue is being "over-qualified" or if my previous business ownership scares prospective employers.
Maybe I should dumb down my resume. Take the master's degree off and just say I was a "case manager" at my former company. Undersell myself a bit? I'm just lost.
This is making lose my mind (up in here, up in here). :(
Hello everyone. I shared my original query months ago under a different manuscript name, and I have since done a lot of revising. It's practically a new book given my many rounds of editing. Query feedback I took to heart the past few months included 1) Retitling the book, 2) Focusing on the protagonist's journey and stakes, and 3) Limiting the worldbuilding. Assume the query template below will be personalized to each agent.
Dear Agent,
I am thrilled to send you THE SILVERING, an 85,000-word upmarket speculative novel that will appeal to readers of Micaiah Johnson’s The Space Between Worlds and Laila Lalami’s The Dream Hotel, as well as viewers haunted by the bureaucratic complicity of Severance.
When Sarah Wilson was ten, she watched her little brother dissolve into quicksilver and vanish into a mirror in their grandparents’ attic. For years she was shuttled through psychiatric wards and medicated into silence. Two decades later, she is a disgruntled waitress living in Fort Wayne, Indiana who has learned to keep her head down and her memories to herself. That is, until she meets an unorthodox lucid dream therapist who helps her decode clues from a recurring nightmare. Clues that lead her to a mysterious man named Lucius, who claims he can take her to Joshua.
With her cousin Damian, she travels with Lucius to a parallel Earth where the sick are harvested to produce a life-extending drug for the healthy. Joshua is alive, working as an enforcer for the eugenicist regime. Sarah quickly learns that finding her brother and rescuing him are not the same. She must figure out how to save him without becoming part of the harvest herself.
I hold a B.A. in psychology and a master’s degree in public administration. A career in social services gave me firsthand knowledge of the bureaucratic systems that inspired this novel and the people they leave behind. Dystopian fiction, it turns out, is an excellent coping mechanism.
Thank you for your time and consideration. I hope to hear from you soon.
Sincerely,
[Author]
Upmarket Speculative: THE SILVERING by [Author]
Dear Agent,
I am thrilled to send you THE SILVERING, an 85,000-word upmarket speculative novel that will appeal to readers of Micaiah Johnson’s The Space Between Worlds and Laila Lalami’s The Dream Hotel, as well as viewers haunted by the bureaucratic complicity of Severance.
When Sarah Wilson was ten, she watched her little brother dissolve into quicksilver and vanish into a mirror in their grandparents’ attic. No one believed her. Labeled delusional, she was shuttled through psychiatric wards and medicated into silence. Two decades later, she is trapped in a dead-end serving job in Fort Wayne, Indiana, still unable to grieve a brother everyone but her calls dead.
Plagued by a recurring nightmare, Sarah takes a chance on an unorthodox lucid-dream therapist who helps her decode the clues buried in it. They lead her to a mysterious man named Lucius, who claims he can take her to Joshua. She knows better than to trust him, but out of desperation, she goes anyway.
With her cousin Damian, the one person who stayed by her side, she travels with Lucius to a parallel Earth where the sick are harvested to extend the lives of the healthy. Joshua is alive, now an enforcer for the eugenicist regime. Sarah quickly learns that finding her brother and rescuing him are not the same. To save the brother she lost, she must confront the man he’s become before the regime decides she is worth more harvested than alive.
I hold a B.A. in psychology and a master’s degree in public administration. A career in social services gave me firsthand knowledge of the bureaucratic systems that inspired this novel and the people they leave behind. Dystopian fiction, it turns out, is an excellent coping mechanism.
Thank you for your time and consideration. I hope to hear from you soon.
Sincerely,
[Author]
I am querying agents for my SFF story about traveling to a dystopian realm where Hitlerian eugenics have manifested and evolved into a program where the sick are sacrificed to sustain the healthy. I can't find any relevant recent comps to use. I have been querying using Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (prose style), Blake Crouch's Dark Matter (parallel realm mechanics), and Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle (alternate WWII history, institutional horror). In terms of the purpose of a comp - to let an agent know where this book would sit on a shelf - my comps are doing their job. But they are old.
Does using old comps reflect poorly to an agent? What do you do if you cannot find strong recent comps? And what if the recent comps don't represent your book as well as old comps?
Hopefully this isn't an indicator that I have written a manuscript that is not marketable in today's literary world.