Seeking: PT Assistant for Waking Vixen

As I’ve started to take a deeper look at my present and future, it’s becoming really clear to me that I need help. So -deep breath- I’m hiring an assistant. Feel free to circulate this to people who you think might be a match, BUT I am not posting this on job boards and shit, because I want to hire someone from the communities I value.

PLEASE READ ALL OF THE BELOW AND FOLLOW THE APPLICATION DIRECTIONS OR YOUR EMAIL WILL BE DELETED. I know this is long. I’ve never hired a paid someone for my own projects before, so I’m picky and trying to be articulate about what I’m looking for so we’re both happy.

The job:
“Assistant” is a really too narrow of a word for what I am looking for. I am a person with many talents and obsessions, you should be too.

I’m in a kind of transitional/growing pains point in my career right now. My Waking Vixen brand and myriad satellite projects are really important to me – but in the past year I’ve gotten a full time job in which I’m deeply immersed, so I need help managing what are supposed to now be side projects but still require more attention than I’m able to give. I need a really excellent person who will do the care and feeding of my current and past projects while I devote myself to new stuff.

Most of the work can be done remotely (this means you in your pajamas at whatever hour of the day that suits you), but we’ll have semi-regular in person meetings and your attendance at the monthly Sex Worker Literati events (1st Thursday of every month) will be most helpful (but not 100% required). This means you need to be in the NYC area.

$10 an hour/10 hours a week. Plus the weird perks of being my right hand person: event passes, raiding the weird books and toys pile, introductions to a variety of fabulous and brilliant characters, maybe homecooked meals, etc. Though the admin and assistant part of the job won’t go away, there is a lot of potential for growth and collaboration in this job. The only way this job will definitely not grow is into a full-time salaried gig.

Here’s a whole lot more about what I’m looking for:

You:
* excited about new media, with a holistic trans-media approach to making media and culture
* committed to sexuality rights with interest in activism, academia, and thoughtful culture about sexuality. IMPORTANT: not solely focused on porn, sex toys, and sexuality-driven entertainment
* smart in unconventional ways. I don’t care about your degrees, but I do care about your writing abilities and grammar
* trustworthy
* efficient
* a good communicator and maybe a bit of a gentle nag
* organized, strategic, and able to assess what ideas and requests coming at the Waking Vixen world are worth my time and what are not
* able to be in touch on a daily basis (M-F, sometimes weekends – also able to enforce boundaries with me. I’m a workaholic.)
* live in the NYC area and/or able to travel into the city on a semi-regular basis

Me:
I’m circulating this among people to whom I’m connected in some way – you don’t have to be my number one fan, but you should be familiar with my projects. I don’t want to hire a total stranger, but that doesn’t mean I have to recognize your name.

What you’ll actually be doing and need to be good at:

Day-to-day:
* process email, including requests for support, research and press inquiries, as well as general correspondence
* maintenance of my online media properties – including copy editing, organizing photo, video, and text content for a variety of websites/blogs
* preparation and distribution of monthly newsletter
* online promotion of events and working on print publication pitches and relationship cultivation, especially for Sex Worker Literati
* other support and maintainence projects we identify together

Necessary technical and communication skills:
* familiarity and comfort with WordPress
* adept with social networking, on top of the latest apps and shit, familiar with the culture and players in the blogosphere(s)
* promotion and publicity experience for online and print publications. successful record of pitching and developing/maintaining relationships with writers would be amazing. ability to be strategic and creative about promotion is key.
* event planning and promotion experience

Bigger picture possibilities, dependent on skills/interest/etc:
* research assistance for my writing projects
* support and collaboration on events I’m producing (panels, film screenings, workshops… etc)
* other awesomeness (purposely open-ended)

Wish-list skills:
* video editing
* graphic design
* web development awesomeness
* miscellaneous geekery

I know a lot of these are big asks and most people will require some polish on one or more of these areas. It’s ok if you’re not 100% awesome at all of these things – but if you’re a great communicator, demonstrate good initiative, and your attitudes and ideas align with mine, we can work together to build the rest of this stuff up.

To Apply, send the following to dacia@wakingvixen.com
* A note about yourself, including why you’re interested in working with me. Please include links to your online presences – I will google stalk you anyway, but it’s lovely if you make this a little easier on me. If I don’t know you but we have people in common – name drop ‘em! I want to hire someone who is invested in my work and communities.
* Please send something resume-ish: if you don’t have a traditional resume, don’t make one for me. I expect high quality work, but I love creativity. Do something different and demonstrate your ability to work with new media and think about sexuality, activism, and promotion in a different and interesting way. Your resume-ish thing could be a link to your website(s) or linkedin or an intro video or other online project. It doesn’t have to be a word document in the traditional resume layout!
* A maximum 200 word blurb about how you envision your life’s work and future iterations of what you want to do when you grow up. This isn’t the “where do you see yourself in 5 years?” question – only boring people have answers to that question. I want to hear about your dreams for your life’s work.
* One criticism of my work (scope, focus, organization, flow of info, communication strategy, etc) and what you think you could do to help fix it.

Deadline for applications: October 9, but get your stuff in ASAP (early bird and all that). I want to fill the position ASAP and get us going.