An Honest and Realistic Cover Letter

by Jaya Saxena

While my attached resume gives you a rundown of my career timeline, I’d like to take a moment to further explain why I would be an excellent candidate for the position of Staff Writer at your publication. As you will see, I have extensive experience writing, editing, and getting distracted by social media as early as 9 a.m. To illustrate, between the previous sentence and this one, I spent five minutes looking through a conversation my friends were having on Twitter and fretting about why I wasn’t included. Sometimes I feel like I was born for the job!

Throughout my career, my passion has been twofold: writing, and secretly Googling how to avoid getting wine teeth. To be honest, I did more of the latter at my previous position, which is why I made the decision to go freelance. The change has been extremely rewarding. In addition to my freelance work, I’m currently working to disrupt the concept of “business casual” by doing all my work in satin shorts with hearts on them from Fredericks of Hollywood and a stained cotton tank top. I’ve also learned a lot in my time as a freelancer. For instance, I’ve become an expert at creative lunch making, once creating an entire meal out of lentils and stale Saltines. I’ve also become adept at subtweeting, unnecessarily polishing silver, and planning hypothetical weddings.

However, as wonderful as freelancing has been, I’m eager to return to an environment where I can collaborate with others, get free lunch sometimes, and not have to pay for my own health insurance.

Further qualifications include the following:

• A full year of being able to conference call naked from my bed without anyone knowing.
• A successful track record of wiping off my laptop screen only for it to be covered in teeny splotches a day later.
• A strong background in having daydreams about my cat losing its paw, crying, and taking an hour to hug her while she becomes increasingly annoyed at me.
• Making killer paneer.

You may also notice there is a gap in my resume from February through July. That time was mainly spent sending pitches into what I can only assume is a deep void. Either that, or to editors who opened them, gathered their coworkers around to laugh, and then high-fived before deleting my correspondence.

Please let me know if you have any further questions. I look forward to refreshing my email every 30 seconds for the next hour before crying and cryptically tweeting about the experience.

Best,
Jaya Saxena

Jaya Saxena is a freelance writer from New York who really does make great paneer.

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