Giving Up the Ghost

Confessions of a Ghost Writer

Have you seen my ghost? Me neither — its a ghost, after all! Though ghosts are supposedly already dead, as a writer I may have to kill mine off for good.
A few years ago, I spent seven lovely nights at the haunted Sainte Claire Hotel in downtown San Jose, California. I didn’t actually see that ghost either, but he/she made their presence felt on the fourth floor by knocking one of our group guests’ shower head off its holder in the middle of the night, as well as ringing for the elevator on several occasions where upbound passengers had to stop for an invisible passenger!

This proves that while some ghosts may be scary, some are benign and can even appear as the bearers of good news. Around the same time as my visit to San Jose, I had become a ghost — that is, a ghost writer — at the invitation of an online publisher who happened to find my author profile on my original publisher’s site. Wonderful! So, I spent the better part of 2 months writing a 30K four-part series that stepped outside a few boundaries for me and my characters.

Through this process I discovered what appeared to be an average rate per word that clients were willing/offering to pay. It seemed paltry, but if that was the going rate, who was I to demand more? Multiply that rate by 30,000 and it was some decent cash at the time. I was…