accounting
I feel really sheepish writing you another Tinyletter so soon after the last one's dramatics, but a) someone asked a question I wanted to answer and then b) I was doing year-end accounting and realized I wanted to talk about money a little (what else is new) so, here we are.
The question was about the ghostwriting I've alluded to at various points this year-- what is it? How does it work? Why doesn't it feel like these books are "mine"? I will do my best to answer, though most details are the purview of an NDA so please forgive any gaps or ellipses. Feel free to ask follow-ups if you have them, and I will answer those as best I can as well!
The ghostwriting thing is, like almost everything in my career, an extremely lucky accident-- a friend has been working for a concern of genre writers for years now, and at some point at the end of last year they had a gig she couldn't take, so she passed my name on to them. It didn't end up working out, but in March of this year, just as the world was shutting down and freelance budgets were collapsing, they got in touch to ask me if I'd take on a project. I had literally nothing else (paid) to do, so I said yes!
To answer common questions: no, I don't think you've heard of the people I write for, but yes, they are obviously successful enough to contract out some of their work. (I mean, I think I can say these are romance novels; having ghostwriters is not uncommon in the genre because of the pace of output required.) Yes, there are very explicit sex scenes. No, you cannot read them. (I mean, you can read them if you can find them, but I can't point you in their direction. NDA!!)
The way it works is that the writers send me outlines with varying levels of detail and I flesh them out into an actual story that reads something like a novel. Sometimes all I've got to work with is a note like "X and Y have dinner and talk about his childhood" and then I'm writing dialogue, making up whole conversations for the characters to have; sometimes that conversation is in the outline, and I'm putting the people who are having it into a room, giving them clothes to wear and things to think about and do with their hands and mouths and eyes while they talk. (What's a sexy dinner to have, is a question I've asked myself a lot for a single person in isolation.)
It's mostly a very interesting writing exercise-- how many ways can I play a scene based on the clues I have? (I love it when the writer who gave me the outline tells me what parts of my work surprised her, because the things I write seem so obvious to me.) How can I take whatever disparate pieces of narrative structure have been thrown at me and make them something cohesive? It's actually not unrelated to the editing work I've been doing, which also requires being able to see what someone was going for, and helping them connect the dots.
There are also interesting questions inherent in romance writing, I think-- how do you create tension in a genre where it is literally required that the romantic leads end up together? How do you make their romance compelling and their ending feel earned? How do you write a good sex scene?? (I have evolving thoughts on this, so more on it next year, maybe, but I think one of the answers is making sure that the physical touches are underlaid with some kind of emotional charge. Why is he doing whatever to her wherever? What does this encounter say that the characters can't or won't?)
I think there are parts of the books that are clearly my writing-- certain descriptive tics etc.-- but they aren't really my ideas, and that's why they don't feel like "mine" in any meaningful way. If you read my books, they're about like three things, total (desire is scary, bodies of water, kinds of parties in LA) and these books are about other things. Writing my own book (something I've also been doing this year, I've written so many words) is such an intense confrontation with and distillation of self; writing these feels scattered and playful, like performance, maybe. It's been a fun and interesting exercise! And I'm sure it's affected my other writing, because how could it not. But it doesn't feel central to my identity as a writer the way the things that have my name on them tend to do.
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All that said, you might imagine that my money situation looks different than it did last year. In 2019, I made $50,000, about half of which came from freelance culture writing; the other half was mostly parts of my advance for Look and Book 4, as yet untitled. This year, I'm likely to end out around $55k, but only $10,000 is from freelancing. The rest is romance novels ($17k), Look payouts, teaching and editing (something like $7k each, I'm too lazy to keep going back to my spreadsheet to check so sorry if that doesn't add up). It has been a wild fucking ride!!! Can't, uh, can't wait to see how the next one shakes out, I guess.
Also given the subject line I feel compelled to make you aware of accountant TikTok. The sound was created by an actor and now seems to be mostly used by sex workers, but I think about it all the time when I'm explaining all of this to someone, how much easier it would be to just say "I have a full-time job as an accountant" !
The question was about the ghostwriting I've alluded to at various points this year-- what is it? How does it work? Why doesn't it feel like these books are "mine"? I will do my best to answer, though most details are the purview of an NDA so please forgive any gaps or ellipses. Feel free to ask follow-ups if you have them, and I will answer those as best I can as well!
The ghostwriting thing is, like almost everything in my career, an extremely lucky accident-- a friend has been working for a concern of genre writers for years now, and at some point at the end of last year they had a gig she couldn't take, so she passed my name on to them. It didn't end up working out, but in March of this year, just as the world was shutting down and freelance budgets were collapsing, they got in touch to ask me if I'd take on a project. I had literally nothing else (paid) to do, so I said yes!
To answer common questions: no, I don't think you've heard of the people I write for, but yes, they are obviously successful enough to contract out some of their work. (I mean, I think I can say these are romance novels; having ghostwriters is not uncommon in the genre because of the pace of output required.) Yes, there are very explicit sex scenes. No, you cannot read them. (I mean, you can read them if you can find them, but I can't point you in their direction. NDA!!)
The way it works is that the writers send me outlines with varying levels of detail and I flesh them out into an actual story that reads something like a novel. Sometimes all I've got to work with is a note like "X and Y have dinner and talk about his childhood" and then I'm writing dialogue, making up whole conversations for the characters to have; sometimes that conversation is in the outline, and I'm putting the people who are having it into a room, giving them clothes to wear and things to think about and do with their hands and mouths and eyes while they talk. (What's a sexy dinner to have, is a question I've asked myself a lot for a single person in isolation.)
It's mostly a very interesting writing exercise-- how many ways can I play a scene based on the clues I have? (I love it when the writer who gave me the outline tells me what parts of my work surprised her, because the things I write seem so obvious to me.) How can I take whatever disparate pieces of narrative structure have been thrown at me and make them something cohesive? It's actually not unrelated to the editing work I've been doing, which also requires being able to see what someone was going for, and helping them connect the dots.
There are also interesting questions inherent in romance writing, I think-- how do you create tension in a genre where it is literally required that the romantic leads end up together? How do you make their romance compelling and their ending feel earned? How do you write a good sex scene?? (I have evolving thoughts on this, so more on it next year, maybe, but I think one of the answers is making sure that the physical touches are underlaid with some kind of emotional charge. Why is he doing whatever to her wherever? What does this encounter say that the characters can't or won't?)
I think there are parts of the books that are clearly my writing-- certain descriptive tics etc.-- but they aren't really my ideas, and that's why they don't feel like "mine" in any meaningful way. If you read my books, they're about like three things, total (desire is scary, bodies of water, kinds of parties in LA) and these books are about other things. Writing my own book (something I've also been doing this year, I've written so many words) is such an intense confrontation with and distillation of self; writing these feels scattered and playful, like performance, maybe. It's been a fun and interesting exercise! And I'm sure it's affected my other writing, because how could it not. But it doesn't feel central to my identity as a writer the way the things that have my name on them tend to do.
-
All that said, you might imagine that my money situation looks different than it did last year. In 2019, I made $50,000, about half of which came from freelance culture writing; the other half was mostly parts of my advance for Look and Book 4, as yet untitled. This year, I'm likely to end out around $55k, but only $10,000 is from freelancing. The rest is romance novels ($17k), Look payouts, teaching and editing (something like $7k each, I'm too lazy to keep going back to my spreadsheet to check so sorry if that doesn't add up). It has been a wild fucking ride!!! Can't, uh, can't wait to see how the next one shakes out, I guess.
Also given the subject line I feel compelled to make you aware of accountant TikTok. The sound was created by an actor and now seems to be mostly used by sex workers, but I think about it all the time when I'm explaining all of this to someone, how much easier it would be to just say "I have a full-time job as an accountant" !
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