Mine

The whole time I was learning these valuable lessons from ghostwriting, my own stories were fading into cyber-dust in my digital literary graveyard.  Occasionally, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, a character from an archived story would interrupt my train of thought when I was walking in my neighborhood or half-asleep at night or doing some mundane chore and remind me of its existence and my obligations to it.  It would tell me how things were going in its particular purgatory and attempt to draw my interest again.  But I habitually made my excuses to each one in turn and kept doing whatever had occupied me until it faded away again.  After all, I was busy working.

And the work I was doing was good work.  You can see from the last few posts that it was engaging me creatively and teaching me to be a better writer.  This is the kind of job you're supposed to want, right?  You're supposed to get a job doing what you love, and then you'll never work a day in your life.  Have you heard that little truism?  Like all truisms, it's about half true.

What no one told me about ghostwriting before I started doing it is how painful it is.  Here I had blended my talent and time and imagination and bits of my soul into these people who lived in these pages, and I loved them.  They were people I had made, people I wanted to protect.  But they didn't belong to me.  I had to give them away to be changed and renamed.  No matter how much the new author loved them, I felt a deep sense of loss in the surrender.

And like nearly all wives since Eve, I told my husband how sad I was.  But my husband, who is not one of those fictional, manageable beings who offer Kleenex and cocktails when confronted with connubial tears, asked me when I was going to write something of my own.  "Look how many books you've already started.  Why don't you just finish one?  What about Dawn Hyperdrive - how long would it take to finish that one?"  And though I tossed him all of the excuses I'd given everyone else for years on why I've never written a book (when you have as many children as I do, people feel nothing but sympathy for you and amazement that you're relatively sane), he didn't believe them.

Probably most of the reason he didn't believe them is that I secretly didn't believe them, either.  I knew that the last few ghostwriting jobs I had finished had changed me inside.  I had discovered the radioactive spider bite, the bat-identity, the star ship with my name on the duty roster that would take me to new galaxies of possibility.  I knew what worked for me.  And I wanted to work - for me.

Read the book that changed my life!  Dawn Hyperdrive and the Galactic Handbag of Death is available at Amazon for Kindle and Kindle apps and at Smashwords for all other e-readers.  You can try the first chapter for free at my website.