[Seth Says] You're telling me a GHOST wrote this poem?

Happy All Hallows Eve! 

Or I guess more accurately, happy All Hallows Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve! It's spooky time, which admittedly is mostly because of the increasingly normalised (shut up spellcheck, I'm pretending I'm British) fascism, but also soon some people will wear costumes, so that's fun for people who enjoy that sort of thing, who are admittedly not me, or at least not me in the past few decades. (Frankly, I already mostly outgrew dressing up as Normal Functional Adult.)

But the subject line joke was of course not originally about ghost-written poems, but 

 

Oops, now I want shrimp-fried rice. Admittedly, I never don't want fried rice, because it is made of delicious. But I also always want pad thai and squashage (sausage-stuffed squash, ideally with cranberries and pecans, making it a perfect autumnal food, surprise, this is now a recipe blog and the previous months of newsletters were all the introduction), and I realize it's getting on towards dinner and I am hungry.

Anyway, a fun thing I've discovered is that few words have less value than my name. At least, that's the natural conclusion from the fact that I've had some more recent gigs ghostwriting various sorts of poems, from wedding roasts to album inserts, and my poetry without my name on it ends up being worth a reasonable amount, but as soon as I put my name on my work, the value plummets tremendously. I feel like I should host special author events where I un-sign books.

Still, I do generally enjoy the ghostwriting. Done a few ghostwritten speeches lately as well, which has been fun. One job I did NOT take was one that I'd joked about for years but never thought I'd see in the wild, which was ghostwriting a paranormal romance. Perfect, right? I also once saw in the wild (I'm calling Upwork "the wild", which I feel is a mostly fair comparison, because Upwork has some scammers, and the wild has some cheetahs) another job I absolutely refused to take but could not believe actually existed, which was someone hiring a ghostwriter to write an essay for their ethics class.  

Yes, really. And speaking of ghosts and writing...
 

My most recent column is a fun little rhyme about some Troubled People, but is also an important reminder to go out and vote. Or, if you're like me, stay in and vote by mail or dropbox. The important thing is to vote, because did I mention the steadily creeping fascism? And by that I mostly mean that it's done by creeps; it's certainly not very hidden. 

They've announced that they want to imprison women who make decisions about their own bodies, not just abortion but they're coming for birth control and IVF too. And meanwhile we have GOP senators saying that the legality of interracial marriage should be left to the states, and celebrities railing against the Jews, Nazis on the highways, their fans referring to The Trans Question, and generally it seems pretty clear that a too-large chunk of the country would be delighted to relegate a whole lot of people to a sub-class of not-people, so it seems like an especially important time to make sure we don't hand that chunk any more power than they already have.

So please do vote if you haven't already, specifically for people who are committed to making sure that we treat all people as people. People who treat people as people are the peopleiest people. (Barbara Streisand, eat your heart out.)
 

The other week on Facebook I posted:
 

Seems plausible to me. This is the guy that got himself a whole month, so six weeks isn't out of the question. Anyway, turns out that little facebook post pretty much sums up this whole newsletter: Undying fascism, hunger, and Halloween. So enjoy some candy, and go vote -- or at least take a stab at it -- and I'll be back in two weeks with another column.


Ave,
Seth

(Maria, eat your heart out)