•
I can’t take selfies with it. Doesn’t have video. Can’t watch a movie. It doesn’t scroll. Or buy sneakers. No email, text, or Face Time. Doesn’t vibrate, buzz, or ping. Can’t play Candy Crush. No Insta or Tik Tok. Can’t find me a date. Doesn’t get me on the bus.…
•
I am a writer. And there comes a time when what I write has to belong to me. It has to be written alone and in silence, with no one looking over my shoulder telling me a better way to write it. It doesn’t have to be great writing. It…
•
Gen AI is a title wave and, sooner or later, OG writers like me are going to be swept out to sea. Since it has already drowned just about everything I hold dear about writing (hang on Hemingway!), I can either stand on the shore shaking my first like a…
•
So I went over the list of 500,000 books eligible for the Anthropic lawsuit settlement and lo and behold and there it was: Death Need Not Be Fatal, the book I wrote with Malachy McCourt. Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion, which works out to about $3,000 per author. Or…
•
I once ghostwrote a book for a man who grew grass for a living, and not the kind you smoke. I took the project reluctantly and only agreed because he offered me a whole lot of money. Going into it, I’d convinced myself the months ahead were going to be…
•
Just to finish up the “How I became a Ghostwriter” saga… So I’m learning as I go on social media. One thing’s for certain, I won’t post any slop. I’m anti-Gen AI when it comes to writing anything. So the six people who are reading my post are getting the…
•
Last week, Anthropic, the parent company of Claude, agreed to pay authors and publishers $1.5 billion in damages for stealing their stuff. But the judge in the case said the robots worked within fair use in copying the works of some 500,000 authors and only went afoul of the law…
•
Fascinating expose in the Times today about the validity of the smash book The Tell by Amy Griffin. Griffin used Molly (MDMA) and ecstasy to unearth buried memories of systematic rape by an Amarillo middle school teacher in the 1980s. The drugs were taken in a therapeutic setting. To say…
•
When people ask me why I ghostwrite, they’re usually under the common misconception that being a published author automatically means you’re rich. Although there are rare moments of instant wealth in publishing, Tara Westover’s Educated and David Goggins’ Can’t Hurt Me come to mind, for the most part book writers…
•
Every so often I get hate comments about my ghostwriting career. The other day, I got a particularly harsh one that made me think about what I do to pay the rent (you didn’t think I made a living from my own books, did you?). So I did a little…