I don't want to tell you this, but I have to: I got fired from my very first job out of college. I still feel the twinges of shame and inadequacy, the fear that at the ripe old age of twenty-two my life had ended before it had begun. But getting fired is how I became a writer. It's why I decided to pen a career guide for young women called "New Girl on the Job: Advice from the Trenches." It was honing my craft, interviewing over a hundred amazing women, and culling their collective wisdom that helped me annul the disappointment and despair of those first nine months of failure.

But back to the aftermath of the firing, an event of such immense importance for me that putting "the" in front of it can only begin to convey its gravity and seems nothing short of appropriate. As the sadness, despair, and shame of the firing slowly began to dissipate and incarnate into inspiration and motivation, I realized I needed to get to work, and I did. Writing for a couple of local newspapers-The Gay City News and The Villager-gave me my first opportunities and eventually made me realize that I was a journalist. It's funny how careers can creep up on you.

Some people regale listeners at cocktails parties with those worthy of a book "aha moments" about how they discovered their career. For me, it wasn't a moment. It was somewhere between covering dog parades and ribbon cutting ceremonies that my job became a career. It incubated in a space where it didn't matter what I was writing about because, for me, there was a story in everything. I was nourished in a way that I didn't even know I could be in the paid marketplace. In my previous job (the one that resulted in "the firing") I endured relentless pettiness while making PowerPoint presentation after PowerPoint presentation-a state that I liked to describe as existing, rather than living. Now, I may have been interviewing a dog owner whose twin bull dogs were dressed as bar-mitzvah boys about the significance of the dog parade for her community, but I looked forward to doing it. I had a career!

And eventually (Oh, that painful lesson that nothing worthwhile happens fast...) I graduated from writing about dog parades to a book deal. The book was inspired by my conviction that I couldn't be the only young woman in the workforce who looked at employment as "job prospects" rather than cultivating a "career" that was going to get her out the door and onto the subway even on the gloomiest of days. Nor could I have been the only twenty-something who didn't bother to ask what my job description was when interviewing for my first position. Or the only one who let myself be bullied by my bosses. There had to be hundreds of stories and even more morsels of wisdom. And there were.

After a lot of hard work and a few lucky turns of events (You know, a little help from a friend of a friend who has a friend.) "New Girl on the Job" was slated for publication on May 29, 2007. While writing the book, I spoke with over one hundred women. The bulk of these women were twenty and early thirty-somethings who were "there" in the trenches, navigating the complexities of the work world. As I say in my book, "They gave the book a palpable context for situations that would just have had Jane Doe examples." Also interviewing women who have "been there, done that"-such as Bobbi Brown, CEO of Bobbi Brown Cosmetics; Judy Woodruff, the legendary journalist; and Gail Evans, author of the career bible, Play Like a Man, Win Like a Woman-gave me the mentoring and perspective that I needed. Perspective that I want pass on to you to other women going to work so they won't have to confess having been fired from a job, or wish they were.

To learn more about "New Girl on the Job," please visit Hannah's web site
at: www.hannahseligson.com.