A scrapbook by any other name is still a scrapbook…

Job searching was so much easier when all I had to do was list my experience and skills and then trust those and my personality to get me through an interview. These days it’s a whole different ball of wax. (hm, I wonder why that little charmer isn’t in my Dictionary of Idioms.)

These days, I have potential employers somehow digging me up on the Web. Considering how many steps I go through to keep my real name isolated from my personal Internet presence (ie – this blog, and the other places where I write and participate), that was an act of spectacular sleuthing, and I am sorely tempted to call the gent up and ask, “Just how, exactly, did you find me?”

I also have potential employers asking for samples of my writing, and my (gulp) portfolio. “Oh, sure,” is my blithe reply. “I can do that.”

Let’s be honest here, I haven’t updated my portfolio in forever, and I’ve never really updated it with job hunting in mind. It is merely a simple, clean and very basic showcase of some of my favorite pieces. Sure, I’ve shopped it out a couple of times, successfully even, as a freelancer, but I’ve never really prepped it to be a display of everything I am as a writer, editor, photographer, etc.

I suppose some folks go through the process of making their portfolio into a work of art, scrapbooking in the professional sense. Me? I haven’t had the time to that, and to be honest, even if I had the time, I’m not sure I would.

I prefer to spend my creativity elsewhere. That and I have this basic love of clean, simple lines, uncluttered spaces and letting an object (or article) speak for itself. Yeah, yeah, I also battle the theater major tendency to believe if a little is good, then a lot is even better (it “reads” better to the audience after all). So, I can be guilty of, well… overdoing it.

So, here I sit, flipping through the pages of my professional scrapbook, whoops, I mean, “portfolio”, and wondering, “What does this say about me?” “Does this show who I really am?” “If I didn’t know me at all, and I looked through this, would I like what I saw?” “How can I make this better, crisper, a more effective showcase?”

Oh, and, “Somebody please remind me to go get some good-quality black paper, a decent paper cutter and more page inserts, please.”

And finally I think, “Oh no! I’m scrapbooking!”