A small rant on Ghostwriting.
As many of you realize, I have been ghostwriting for some time. I am responsible for 6 erotic novels and a dozen erotic short stories. Pops warned me things with this kind of employment are complicated emotionally, not the writing, but the living with others making money off your work.
Pops wrote six or seven novels as a ghostwriter. Did dozens of treatments of books for screenplays and ghosted several feature films. Still today, more than 27 years since his last ghost work, he gets upset when he thinks of movies others conceived using his treatment or screenplay. He can’t tell anyone this is my work or my idea. I wrote this.
I’m already having the same kind of issues. Money is the only thing making the unbearable lack of recognition … bearable. I didn’t think the anonymity would bother me. The issue bugs me most, and this petty, but this bugs me most when I talk to my authors, and they give glowing reports on their latest work’s performance. I want to scream, “Stop talking like you wrote the thing.”
I don’t. Granted, Pops’s work has stood the test of time. My stories won’t; after all, they are fuck stories on the short pieces, nothing more. The longer works have enough plot to be more, but still, erotica is titillation, not Shakespear.
Don’t misunderstand me. I realize I’m not a terrific writer, and I don’t think I am. I write, by in large, junk, and the money is my compensation. But I like hearing, “Good story. Loved the last one, what a wonderful twist,” and you guys hand the kudos, which keeps me going. I guess I worry I’ll do something special, something which isn’t mere erotica, and no one will ever figure out the work was mine.