#did i ghostwrite this /j

[avpdcultureis]

avpd culture is having a best friend that you never, ever *really* open up to...

.

[rodeorun]

Every single line of this was gold!!!! I love this concept and the reality of it because THIS feels like Oikawa. He's often boiled down to such a playboy sleeze in fanon (as most character are) but this is peak Oikawa.

Not me about to read a fictional characters charts and placements but this is so on brand "But when he had time to dedicate to self-pleasure, a plush pillow that still held a bit of shape when moved around and a satin pillowcase is all he needed." It reeks of loverboy who's all sensual and soft and slow. The diction here is great because this almost leans on the side of romantic and if that isn't Oikawa then I don't know what it. Brilliant. Genius. I'm obsessed. Gonna read this daily.

VIRGIN OIKAWA OH MY GOD THATS SO FUCKING HOT 😍😍😍😍😍😍

you think so? well, i got another little headcanon about Virgin Oikawa and imma be honest; this one makes me giggle a little bit 🤭

ᴛᴀʟᴋ ᴛᴏ ᴇᴍ 🗣️! : i’m on a fucking ROLL today 👹 anyways, im the biggest guy virgin enthusiast. fuck a girl being a virgin, that shit is so predictable. give me a boy who don’t know how to use his dick and i’m all up on that (metaphorically and literally)

ᴄᴡ: solo play/masturbation. Not gender specific and not proofread. be nice to me, aight?

Virgin! Oikawa is a pillow humper.

He doesn't use those silicone molds because, behind that flirtatious persona, he's a lover boy at heart. If he's going to stick his dick in a hole of any kind, he wants it to be with someone he's romantically involved with at the very least. Plus, he's not that desperate. Even if not a soul in the world would have him pegged as a virgin, he still has a reputation to uphold. He'll occasionally use his own hand to offer him some late-night release, but it's really only an option if he's trying to make it quick.

But when he had time to dedicate to self-pleasure, a plush pillow that still held a bit of shape when moved around and a satin pillowcase is all he needed.

He'd adjust his pillow under his hips, his hard-on just barely grazing the silky fabric below him. A soft exhale escapes his lips as he lowers himself, pressing his navel down into the mattress. Oikawa lays still for a moment, letting himself relish in the feeling of cool, soft satin gently encasing his cock.

Slowly, he begins to rock his hips, dragging his length up and down to find a good starting rhythm. Once he finds it, he commits to it, balancing himself on his elbows for better stability.

Oikawa imagines this is what your insides must feel like. The pre soaked material emulating the wetness and velvety feel that he'd read about. It was warm and comforting with just the right amount of friction and tightness that his dick doesn't feel like it's suffocating. He pictures you below him, your face flushed and screwed up in pleasure. How pretty you sound when you moan his name. How your hands feel when they wander his body. How you'd praise him.

The brunette whimpers softly, completely lost in his fantasy. His hands grip the edge of his pillow as he unconsciously thrusts harder and faster into it, his bed-frame quietly squeaking. It's not long before he feels that familiar warmth building in his stomach, suddenly very aware of how heavy his balls feel as he continues rutting into his pillow.

He moans loudly, looking down at the precum-smeared case. It sheens in the soft light of his room and he can't help but imagine it's your privates glistening in your shared juices. That's all he needs to trigger his release, his arms giving out under him as he shoots his load into the pillow. He moans loudly into the mattress, his hips stuttering as he rides through the rest of his orgasm.

Oikawa rolls over onto his back, throwing the cum covered pillow on the floor to be washed later. He stares at the ceiling as he catches his breath, the occasional aftershock making his cock twitch. He snorted softly, crossing his arms over his eyes.

For the time being, pillows worked just fine.

[tlbodine]

Overthinking: Why I'm Afraid of Bees

Why I'm Afraid of Bees came out in March of 1994, the 17th Goosebumps book. I never read this one as a kid, but I do remember the cover. It's pretty iconic, and it cracks me up. He looks so shocked but also slightly embarrassed, which is an objectively hilarious response to becoming a bee. A+

So did this turn out to bee a hit, or did it leave me feeling a sting of disappointment? Let's overthink it.

First, the Plot:

Gary Lutz (Lutz the Klutz, and you knew that was going to be his nickname) has a rough life. He's the last to get picked for sports, makes a fool of himself trying to impress his crush, gets beaten up by bullies, AND is tormented by his beekeeping neighbor. He's scared of bees (and dogs, and the dark, and...), his parents are out of touch, his sister is annoying, even her cat hates him. The only thing he really enjoys is playing computer games.

Frankly, Gary's life sucks, so it's no wonder he jumps at the opportunity to take a vacation from himself. He answers an ad for a program called Person 2 Person, which lets people swap bodies for two weeks to try a new lifestyle. He gets matched with athletic Dirk Davis, who wants a nerd to pass his math tests for him.

Unfortunately, something goes wrong with the equipment during the transfer, and Gary ends up in the body of a bee instead. Dirk Davis has his body...and the bee is in Dirk's. Oh no.

Gary spends a while buzzing around living the bee life, trying to get someone, anyone, to help him while evading various threats and dangers. Eventually he does make contact with the lady running the program, but she tells him Dirk doesn't want to give his body back, so Gary is out of luck.

Dissatisfied with this answer, Gary goes to deal with Dirk and discovers that he's living his life better than he was. He's become popular and athletic, he's a cool skater guy now, his family all like him. Meanwhile Gary is a bee. Bummer. Luckily, being a bee has SOME advantages, because he can lead other bees to attack Dirk! In the frenzy, Gary stings him, feeling temporarily triumphant before remembering that bees die after using their stingers, oops.

Luckily he awakens back in his body, unharmed and well. He's grateful for a new lease on life, no longer afraid of bees, and...curiously fond of flowers now....

Overthinking It:

This book combines two primal horrors: the horror of being trapped in an alien body, and the horror of someone else stealing your life and living it better than you.

Unfortunately, I struggled to really engage with either concept in this book, largely because the tone and style felt so distractingly off.

Let's just address the elephant in the room here. In a lawsuit between Stine's publisher (Parachute Press) and Scholastic, it was admitted that Stine sometimes used ghostwriters to help him flesh out outlines into drafts, which he would edit. I had my suspicions about this book and looked it up and -- wouldn't you know it, but the allegations say this began after book 16.

I don't think Stine had all of his books ghost-written, but I do think this one is, and it suffers for it a bit because it simply misses the mark for the brand.

Here's my analysis as someone who's read a lot of these back to back:

The broad strokes of the plot feel very Goosebumps-y. We've got weird science, a bullied kid with a sibling, a cat who's a menace. I believe that the concept of "a kid tries to body swap and gets turned into a bee" sounds like a story idea that Stine would come up with, and it tracks that he was reportedly inspired by a Robert Sheckley novel, Mindswap, as well as (I'm sure) the Vincent Price version of The Fly.

But a lot of the details don't feel Stine-ish. The book is lacking his goofy humor. There's not as much banter and jokes, and the characters overall feel kind of flat, especially the bullies and the little sister (both stock tropes Stine writes a lot of). It's hard to explain and I don't have a paper copy to quote but just...it feels a little off. The ending shoehorns in a moral, which Stine generally doesn't do, and the final twist falls kind of flat. I feel like if Stine wrote it the book would be funnier, idk.

More telling, imo, is the book is missing a lot of signature words and phrases that Stine uses all the time in his writing. You can (and others have) play bingo with Stine's recurring vocabulary because he's quite consistent with it. In Why I'm Afraid of Bees, I noticed a startling lack of: characters thinking they're a riot, "I opened my mouth to scream but no sound came out," voices that are tiny and shrill with fright (Gary's voice is tiny but only as a bee), characters saying "huh?" a lot, "gotcha," guys described as "tough-looking." Gary does at least frequently think of himself as a jerk, so there's that.

The book is filled with bee facts and seems to really want you to feel empathetic toward bees and stop killing them, which is a beautiful and noble message but feels super weird in a Goosebumps book.

So...yeah. Idk. I can't prove this was ghost-written, but it certainly feels like it could be. And compared to Monster Blood II, which I am reading right now (the next in series), which certainly DOES feel like Stine's work, this one stands out even more.

Also, this is a silly gripe, but it distracted me the entire book. What is the whole deal with Person 2 Person? How is this company in business? Why don't they charge any money for the service? How do they do the body swap without both participants in the same room? What do you MEAN she simply can't make the other guy give Gary's body back? Just. The entire thing is nonsensical.

I actually didn't hate this book -- a lot of the bee adventures are genuinely thrilling -- but I kept getting distracted and pulled out of the story.

(Also there is some very funny, extremely dated computer talk in there. Please enjoy the detailed descriptions of Gary connecting to electronic bulletin boards, leaving "electronic notes," and getting game tips for what I strongly suspect is a text-based parser adventure game like Zork. Amazing cultural relic. Worth a read just for that.)

If You Liked This, THESE Will Really Give You Goosebumps:

Shout-out to Robert Sheckley's Mindswap and of course the trilogy of The Fly, Return of the Fly, and Curse of the Fly, wherein Vincent Price gets turned into a fly. Compare and contrast with the Cronenberg version of The Fly from the 1980s, which leans hard on the body horror.

I think this book also pays homage to another 50s pulp classic, The Incredible Shrinking Man.

For a different horror take on body-swap hijinks, try Freaky.

[ingek73]

Personal History

May 15, 2023 Issue

Notes from Prince Harry’s Ghostwriter

Collaborating on his memoir, “Spare,” meant spending hours together on Zoom, meeting his inner circle, and gaining a new perspective on the tabloids.

By J. R. Moehringer

May 8, 2023

A portrait of Prince Harry composed of scribbles that evoke writing on a yellow piece of binder paper.

Work with Prince Harry on the book proceeded steadily—until the press found out about it.Illustration by Simone Massoni

I was exasperated with Prince Harry. My head was pounding, my jaw was clenched, and I was starting to raise my voice. And yet some part of me was still able to step outside the situation and think, This is so weird. I’m shouting at Prince Harry. Then, as Harry started going back at me, as his cheeks flushed and his eyes narrowed, a more pressing thought occurred: Whoa, it could all end right here.

This was the summer of 2022. For two years, I’d been the ghostwriter on Harry’s memoir, “Spare,” and now, reviewing his latest edits in a middle-of-the-night Zoom session, we’d come to a difficult passage. Harry, at the close of gruelling military exercises in rural England, gets captured by pretend terrorists. It’s a simulation, but the tortures inflicted upon Harry are very real. He’s hooded, dragged to an underground bunker, beaten, frozen, starved, stripped, forced into excruciating stress positions by captors wearing black balaclavas. The idea is to find out if Harry has the toughness to survive an actual capture on the battlefield. (Two of his fellow-soldiers don’t; they crack.) At last, Harry’s captors throw him against a wall, choke him, and scream insults into his face, culminating in a vile dig at—Princess Diana?

Even the fake terrorists engrossed in their parts, even the hard-core British soldiers observing from a remote location, seem to recognize that an inviolate rule has been broken. Clawing that specific wound, the memory of Harry’s dead mother, is out of bounds. When the simulation is over, one of the participants extends an apology.

Harry always wanted to end this scene with a thing he said to his captors, a comeback that struck me as unnecessary, and somewhat inane. Good for Harry that he had the nerve, but ending with what he said would dilute the scene’s meaning: that even at the most bizarre and peripheral moments of his life, his central tragedy intrudes. For months, I’d been crossing out the comeback, and for months Harry had been pleading for it to go back in. Now he wasn’t pleading, he was insisting, and it was 2 a.m., and I was starting to lose it. I said, “Dude, we’ve been over this.”

Why was this one line so important? Why couldn’t he accept my advice? We were leaving out a thousand other things—that’s half the art of memoir, leaving stuff out—so what made this different? Please, I said, trust me. Trust the book.

Although this wasn’t the first time that Harry and I had argued, it felt different; it felt as if we were hurtling toward some kind of decisive rupture, in part because Harry was no longer saying anything. He was just glaring into the camera. Finally, he exhaled and calmly explained that, all his life, people had belittled his intellectual capabilities, and this flash of cleverness proved that, even after being kicked and punched and deprived of sleep and food, he had his wits about him.

“Oh,” I said. “O.K.” It made sense now. But I still refused.

“Why?”

Because, I told him, everything you just said is about you. You want the world to know that you did a good job, that you were smart. But, strange as it may seem, memoir isn’t about you. It’s not even the story of your life. It’s a story carved from your life, a particular series of events chosen because they have the greatest resonance for the widest range of people, and at this point in the story those people don’t need to know anything more than that your captors said a cruel thing about your mom.

Harry looked down. A long time. Was he thinking? Seething? Should I have been more diplomatic? Should I have just given in? I imagined I’d be thrown off the book soon after sunup. I could almost hear the awkward phone call with Harry’s agent, and I was sad. Never mind the financial hit—I was focussed on the emotional shock. All the time, the effort, the intangibles I’d invested in Harry’s memoir, in Harry, would be gone just like that.

After what seemed like an hour, Harry looked up, and we locked eyes. “O.K.,” he said.

“O.K.?”

“Yes. I get it.”

“Thank you, Harry,” I said, relieved.

He shot me a mischievous grin. “I really enjoy getting you worked up like that.”

I burst into laughter and shook my head, and we moved on to his next set of edits.

Later that morning, after a few hours of sleep, I sat outside worrying. (Mornings are my worry time, along with afternoons and evenings.) I didn’t worry so much about the propriety of arguing with princes, or even the risks. One of a ghostwriter’s main jobs is having a big mouth. You win some, you lose most, but you have to keep pushing, not unlike a demanding parent or a tyrannical coach. Otherwise, you’re nothing but a glorified stenographer, and that’s disloyalty to the author, to the book—to books. Opposition is true Friendship, William Blake wrote, and if I had to choose a ghostwriting credo, that would be it.

No, rather than the rightness of going after Harry, I was questioning the heat with which I’d done so. I scolded myself: It’s not your comeback. It’s not your mother. For the thousandth time in my ghostwriting career, I reminded myself: It’s not your effing book.

Some days, the phone doesn’t stop. Ghostwriters in distress. They ask for ten minutes, half an hour. A coffee date.

“My author can’t remember squat.”

“My author and I have come to despise each other.”

“I can’t get my author to call me back—is it normal for a ghost to get ghosted?”

At the outset, I do what ghostwriters do. I listen. And eventually, after the callers talk themselves out, I ask a few gentle questions. The first (aside from “How did you get this number?”) is always: How bad do you want it? Because things can go sideways in a hurry. An author might know nothing about writing, which is why he hired a ghost. But he may also have the literary self-confidence of Saul Bellow, and good luck telling Saul Bellow that he absolutely may not describe an interesting bowel movement he experienced years ago, as I once had to tell an author. So fight like crazy, I say, but always remember that if push comes to shove no one will have your back. Within the text and without, no one wants to hear from the dumb ghostwriter.

I try not to sound didactic. A lot of what I’ve read about ghostwriting, much of it from accomplished ghostwriters, doesn’t square with my experience. Recording the author? Terrible idea—it makes many authors feel as if they’re being deposed. Dressing like the author? It’s a memoir, not a masquerade party. The ghostwriter for Julian Assange wrote twenty-five thousand words about his methodology, and it sounded to me like Elon Musk on mushrooms—on Mars. That same ghost, however, published a review of “Spare” describing Harry as “off his royal tits” and me as going “all Sartre or Faulkner,” so what do I know? Who am I to offer rules? Maybe the alchemy of each ghost-author pairing is unique.

Therefore, I simply remind the callers that ghostwriting is an art and urge them not to let those who cast it as hacky, shady, or faddish (it’s been around for thousands of years) dim their pride. I also tell them that they’re providing a vital public service, helping to shore up the publishing industry, since most of the titles on this week’s best-seller list were written by someone besides the named author.

Signing off, the callers usually sigh and say thanks and grumble something like “Well, whatever happens, I’m never doing this again.” And I tell them yes, they will, and wish them luck.

How does a person even become a ghostwriter? What’s the path into a profession for which there is no school or certification, and to which no one actually aspires? You never hear a kid say, “One day, I want to write other people’s books.” And yet I think I can detect some hints, some foreshadowing in my origins.

When I was growing up in Manhasset, New York, people would ask: Where’s your dad? My typical answer was an embarrassed shrug. Beats me. My old man wasn’t around, that’s all I knew, all any grownup had the heart to tell me. And yet he was also everywhere. My father was a well-known rock-and-roll d.j., so his Sam Elliott basso profundo was like the Long Island Rail Road, rumbling in the distance at maddeningly regular intervals.

Every time I caught his show, I’d feel confused, empty, sad, but also amazed at how much he had to say. The words, the jokes, the patter—it didn’t stop. Was it my Oedipal counterstrike to fantasize an opposite existence, one in which I just STFU? Less talking, more listening, that was my basic life plan at age ten. In Manhasset, an Irish-Italian enclave, I was surrounded by professional listeners: bartenders and priests. Neither of those careers appealed to me, so I waited, and one afternoon found myself sitting with a cousin at the Squire theatre, in Great Neck, watching a matinée of “All the President’s Men.” Reporters seemed to do nothing but listen. Then they got to turn what they heard into stories, which other people read—no talking required. Sign me up.

My first job out of college was at the New York Times. When I wasn’t fetching coffee and corned beef, I was doing “legwork,” which meant running to a fire, a trial, a murder scene, then filing a memo back to the newsroom. The next morning, I’d open the paper and see my facts, maybe my exact words, under someone else’s name. I didn’t mind; I hated my name. I was born John Joseph Moehringer, Jr., and Senior was M.I.A. Not seeing my name, his name, wasn’t a problem. It was a perk.

Many days at the Times, I’d look around the newsroom, with its orange carpet and pipe-puffing lifers and chattering telex machines, and think, I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. And then the editors suggested I go somewhere else.

I went west. I got a job at the Rocky Mountain News, a tabloid founded in 1859. Its first readers were the gold miners panning the rivers and creeks of the Rockies, and though I arrived a hundred and thirty-one years later, the paper still read as if it were written for madmen living alone in them thar hills. The articles were thumb-length, the fact checking iffy, and the newsroom mood, many days, bedlam. Some oldsters were volubly grumpy about being on the back slopes of middling careers, others were blessed with unjustified swagger, and a few were dangerously loose cannons. (I’ll never forget the Sunday morning our religion writer, in his weekly column, referred to St. Joseph as “Christ’s stepdad.” The phones exploded.) The general lack of quality control made the paper a playground for me. I was able to go slow, learn from mistakes without being defined by them, and build up rudimentary skills, like writing fast.

What I did best, I discovered, was write for others. The gossip columnist spent most nights in downtown saloons, hunting for scoops, and some mornings he’d shuffle into the newsroom looking rough. One morning, he fixed his red eyes on me, gestured toward his notes, and rasped, “Would you?” I sat at his desk and dashed off his column in twenty minutes. What a rush. Writing under no name was safe; writing under someone else’s name (and picture) was hedonic—a kind of hiding and seeking. Words had never come easy for me, but, when I wrote as someone else, the words, the jokes, the patter—it didn’t stop.

In the fall of 2006, my phone rang. Unknown number. But I instantly recognized the famously soft voice: for two decades, he’d loomed over the tennis world. Now, on the verge of retiring, he told me that he was decompressing from the emotions of the moment by reading my memoir, “The Tender Bar,” which had recently been published. It had him thinking about writing his own. He wondered if I’d come talk to him about it. A few weeks later, we met at a restaurant in his home town, Las Vegas.

Andre Agassi and I were very different, but our connection was instant. He had an eighth-grade education but a profound respect for people who read and write books. I had a regrettably short sporting résumé (my Little League fastball was unhittable) but deep reverence for athletes. Especially the solitaries: tennis players, prizefighters, matadors, who possess that luminous charisma which comes from besting opponents single-handedly. But Andre didn’t want to talk about that. He hated tennis, he said. He wanted to talk about memoir. He had a list of questions. He asked why my memoir was so confessional. I told him that’s how you know you can trust an author—if he’s willing to get raw.

He asked why I’d organized my memoir around other people, rather than myself. I told him that was the kind of memoir I admired. There’s so much power to be gained, and honesty to be achieved, from taking an ostensibly navel-gazing genre and turning the gaze outward. Frank McCourt had a lot of feelings about his brutal Irish childhood, but he kept most of them to himself, focussing instead on his Dad, his Mam, his beloved siblings, the neighbors down the lane.

“I am a part of all that I have met.” It might’ve been that first night, or another, but at some point I shared that line from Tennyson, and Andre loved it. The same almost painful gratitude that I felt toward my mother, and toward my bartender uncle and his barfly friends, who helped her raise me, Andre felt for his trainer and his coach, and for his wife, Stefanie Graf.

But how, he asked, do you write about other people without invading their privacy? That’s the ultimate challenge, I said. I sought permission from nearly everyone I wrote about, and shared early drafts, but sometimes people aren’t speaking to you, and sometimes they’re dead. Sometimes, in order to tell the truth, you simply can’t avoid hurting someone’s feelings. It goes down easier, I said, if you’re equally unsparing about yourself.

He asked if I’d help him do it. I gave him a soft no. I liked his enthusiasm, his boldness—him. But I’d never imagined myself writing someone else’s book, and I already had a job. By now, I’d left the Rocky Mountain News and joined the Los Angeles Times. I was a national correspondent, doing long-form journalism, which I loved. Alas, the Times was about to change. A new gang of editors had come in, and not long after my dinner with Andre they let it be known that the paper would no longer prioritize long-form journalism.

Apart from a beef with my bosses, and apart from the money (Andre was offering a sizable bump from my reporter salary), what finally made me change my no to a yes, put my stuff into storage, and move to Vegas was the sense that Andre was suffering an intense and specific ache that I might be able to cure. He wanted to tell his story and didn’t know how; I’d been there. I’d struggled for years to tell my story.

Every attempt failed, and every failure took a heavy psychic toll. Some days, it felt like a physical blockage, and to this day I believe my story would’ve remained stuck inside me forever if not for one editor at the Times, who on a Sunday afternoon imparted some thunderbolt advice about memoir that steered me onto the right path. I wanted to give Andre that same grace.

Shortly before I moved to Vegas, a friend invited me to a fancy restaurant in the Phoenix suburbs for a gathering of sportswriters covering the 2008 Super Bowl. As the menus were being handed around, my friend clinked a knife against his glass and announced, “O.K., listen up! Moehringer here has been asked by Agassi to ghostwrite his—”

Groans.

“Exactly. We’ve all done our share of these fucking things—”

Louder groans.

“Right! Our mission is not to leave this table until we’ve convinced this idiot to tell Agassi not just no but hell no.”

At once, the meal turned into a raucous meeting of Ghostwriters Anonymous. Everyone had a hard-luck story about being disrespected, dismissed, shouted at, shoved aside, abused in a hilarious variety of ways by an astonishing array of celebrities, though I mostly remember the jocks. The legendary basketball player who wouldn’t come to the door for his first appointment with his ghost, then appeared for the second buck naked. The hockey great with the personality of a hockey stick, who had so few thoughts about his time on this planet, so little interest in his own book, that he gave his ghost an epic case of writer’s block. The notorious linebacker who, days before his memoir was due to the publisher, informed his ghost that the co-writing credit would go to his psychotherapist.

Between gasping and laughing, I asked the table, “Why do they do it? Why do they treat ghostwriters so badly?” I was bombarded with theories.

Authors feel ashamed about needing someone to write their story, and that shame makes them behave in shameful ways.

Authors think they could write the book themselves, if only they had time, so they resent having to pay you to do it.

Authors spend their lives safeguarding their secrets, and now you come along with your little notebook and pesky questions and suddenly they have to rip back the curtain? Boo.

But if all authors treat all ghosts badly, I wondered, and if it’s not your book in the first place, why not cash the check and move on? Why does it hurt so much? I don’t recall anyone having a good answer for that.

“Please,” I said to Andre, “don’t give me a story to tell at future Super Bowls.” He grinned and said he’d do his best. He did better than that. In two years of working together, we never exchanged a harsh word, not even when he felt my first draft needed work.

Maybe the Germans have a term for it, the particular facial expression of someone reading something about his life that’s even the tiniest bit wrong. Schaudergesicht? I saw that look on Andre’s face, and it made me want to lie down on the floor. But, unlike me, he didn’t overreact. He knew that putting a first serve into the net is no big deal. He made countless fixes, and I made fixes to his fixes, and together we made ten thousand more, and in time we arrived at a draft that satisfied us both. The collaboration was so close, so synchronous, you’d have to call the eventual voice of the memoir a hybrid—though it’s all Andre. That’s the mystic paradox of ghostwriting: you’re inherent and nowhere; vital and invisible. To borrow an image from William Gass, you’re the air in someone else’s trumpet.

“Open,” by Andre Agassi, was published on November 9, 2009. Andre was pleased, reviewers were complimentary, and I soon had offers to ghost other people’s memoirs. Before deciding what to do next, I needed to get away, clear my head. I went to the Green Mountains. For two days, I drove around, stopped at wayside meadows, sat under trees and watched the clouds—until one late afternoon I began feeling unwell. I bought some cold medicine, pulled into the first bed-and-breakfast I saw, and climbed into bed. Hand-sewn quilt under my chin, I switched on the TV. There was Andre, on a late-night talk show.

The host was praising “Open,” and Agassi was being his typical charming, humble self. Now the host was praising the writing. Agassi continued to be humble. Thank you, thank you. But I dared to hope he might mention . . . me? An indefensible, illogical hope: Andre had asked me to put my name on the cover, and I’d declined. Nevertheless, right before zonking out, I started muttering at the TV, “Say my name.” I got a bit louder. “Say my name!” I got pretty rowdy. “Say my fucking name!”

Seven hours later, I stumbled downstairs to the breakfast room and caught a weird vibe. Guests stared. Several peered over my shoulder to see who was with me. What the? I sat alone, eating some pancakes, until I got it. The bed-and-breakfast had to be three hundred years old, with walls made of pre-Revolutionary cardboard—clearly every guest had heard me. Say my name!

I took it as a lesson. NyQuil was to blame, but also creeping narcissism. The gods were admonishing me: You can’t be Mister Rogers while ghosting the book and John McEnroe when it’s done. I drove away from Vermont with newfound clarity. I’m not cut out for this ghostwriting thing. I needed to get back to my first love, journalism, and to writing my own books.

During the next year or so, I freelanced for magazines while making notes for a novel. Then once more to the wilderness. I rented a tiny cabin in the far corner of nowhere and, for a full winter, rarely left. No TV, no radio, no Wi-Fi. For entertainment, I listened to the silver foxes screaming at night in a nearby forest, and I read dozens of books. But mostly I sat before the woodstove and tried to inhabit the minds of my characters. The novel was historical fiction, based on the decades-long crime spree of America’s most prolific bank robber, but also based on my disgust with the bankers who had recently devastated the global financial system. In real life, my bank-robbing protagonist wrote a memoir, with a ghostwriter, which was full of lies or delusions. I thought it might be fascinating to override that memoir with solid research, overwrite the ghostwriter, and become, in effect, the ghostwriter of the ghostwriter of a ghost.

I gave everything I had to that novel, but when it was published, in 2012, it got mauled by an influential critic. The review was then instantly tweeted by countless humanitarians, often with sidesplitting commentary like “Ouch.” I was on book tour at the time and read the review in a pitch-dark hotel room knowing full well what it meant: the book was stillborn. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t stand. Part of me wanted to never leave that room. Part of me never did.

I barely slept or ate for months. My savings ran down. Occasionally, I’d take on a freelance assignment, profile an athlete for a magazine, but mostly I was in hibernation. Then one day the phone rang. A soft voice, vaguely familiar. Andre, asking if I was up for working with someone on a memoir.

Who?

Phil Knight.

Who?

Andre sighed. Founder of Nike?

A business book didn’t seem like my thing. But I needed to do something, and writing my own stuff was out. I went to the initial meeting thinking, It’s only an hour of my life. It wound up being three years.

Luckily, Phil had no interest in doing the typical C.E.O. auto-hagiography. He’d sought writing advice from Tobias Wolff, he was pals with a Pulitzer-winning novelist. He wanted to write a literary memoir, unfolding his mistakes, his anxieties—his quest. He viewed entrepreneurship, and sports, as a spiritual search. (He’d read deeply in Taoism and Zen.) Since I, too, was in search of meaning, I thought his book might be just the thing I needed.

It was. It was also, in every sense of that overused phrase, a labor of love. (I married the book’s editor.) When “Shoe Dog” was published, in April, 2016, I reflected on the dire warnings I’d heard at Super Bowl XLII and thought, What were they talking about? I felt like a guy, warned off by a bunch of wizened gamblers, who hits the jackpot twice with the first two nickels he sticks into a slot machine. Then again, I figured, better quit while I’m ahead.

Back to magazine writing. I also dared to start another novel. More personal, more difficult than the last, it absorbed me totally and I was tunnelling toward a draft while also starting a family. There was no time for anything else, no desire. And yet some days I’d hear that siren call. An actor, an activist, a billionaire, a soldier, a politician, another billionaire, a lunatic would phone, seeking help with a memoir.

Twice I said yes. Not for the money. I’ve never taken a ghosting gig for the money. But twice I felt that I had no choice, that the story was too cool, the author just too compelling, and twice the author freaked out at my first draft. Twice I explained that first drafts are always flawed, that error is the mother of truth, but it wasn’t just the errors. It was the confessions, the revelations, the cold-blooded honesty that memoir requires. Everyone says they want to get raw until they see how raw feels.

Twice the author killed the book. Twice I sat before a stack of pages into which I’d poured my soul and years of my life, knowing they were good, and knowing that they were about to go into a drawer forever. Twice I said to my wife, Never again.

And then, in the summer of 2020, I got a text. The familiar query. Would you be interested in speaking with someone about ghosting a memoir? I shook my head no. I covered my eyes. I picked up the phone and heard myself blurting, Who?

Prince Harry.

I agreed to a Zoom. I was curious, of course. Who wouldn’t be? I wondered what the real story was. I wondered if we’d have any chemistry. We did, and there was, I think, a surprising reason. Princess Diana had died twenty-three years before our first conversation, and my mother, Dorothy Moehringer, had just died, and our griefs felt equally fresh.

Still, I hesitated. Harry wasn’t sure how much he wanted to say in his memoir, and that concerned me. I’d heard similar reservations, early on, from both authors who’d ultimately killed their memoirs. Also, I knew that whatever Harry said, whenever he said it, would set off a storm. I am not, by nature, a storm chaser. And there were logistical considerations. In the early stages of a global pandemic, it was impossible to predict when I’d be able to sit down with Harry in the same room. How do you write about someone you can’t meet?

Harry had no deadline, however, and that enticed me. Many authors are in a hot hurry, and some ghosts are happy to oblige. They churn and burn, producing three or four books a year. I go painfully slow; I don’t know any other way. Also, I just liked the dude. I called him dude right away; it made him chuckle. I found his story, as he outlined it in broad strokes, relatable and infuriating. The way he’d been treated, by both strangers and intimates, was grotesque. In retrospect, though, I think I selfishly welcomed the idea of being able to speak with someone, an expert, about that never-ending feeling of wishing you could call your mom.

Harry and I made steady progress in the course of 2020, largely because the world didn’t know what we were up to. We could revel in the privacy of our Zoom bubble. As Harry grew to trust me, he brought other people into the bubble, connecting me with his inner circle, a vital phase in every ghosting job. There is always someone who knows your author’s life better than he does, and your task is to find that person fast and interview his socks off.

As the pandemic waned, I was finally able to travel to Montecito. I went once with my wife and children. (Harry won the heart of my daughter, Gracie, with his vast “Moana” scholarship; his favorite scene, he told her, is when Heihei, the silly chicken, finds himself lost at sea.) I also went twice by myself. Harry put me up in his guesthouse, where Meghan and Archie would visit me on their afternoon walks. Meghan, knowing I was missing my family, was forever bringing trays of food and sweets.

Little by little, Harry and I amassed hundreds of thousands of words. When we weren’t Zooming or phoning, we were texting around the clock. In due time, no subject was off the table. I felt honored by his candor, and I could tell that he felt astonished by it. And energized. While I always emphasized storytelling and scenes, Harry couldn’t escape the wish that “Spare” might be a rebuttal to every lie ever published about him. As Borges dreamed of endless libraries, Harry dreams of endless retractions, which meant no end of revelations. He knew, of course, that some people would be aghast at first. “Why on earth would Harry talk about that?” But he had faith that they would soon see: because someone else already talked about it, and got it wrong.

He was joyful at this prospect; everything in our bubble was good. Then someone leaked news of the book.

Whoever it was, their callousness toward Harry extended to me. I had a clause in my contract giving me the right to remain unidentified, a clause I always insist on, but the leaker blew that up by divulging my name to the press. Along with pretty much anyone who has had anything to do with Harry, I woke one morning to find myself squinting into a gigantic searchlight. Every hour, another piece would drop, each one wrong. My fee was wrong, my bio was wrong, even my name.

One royal expert cautioned that, because of my involvement in the book, Harry’s father should be “looking for a pile of coats to hide under.” When I mentioned this to Harry, he stared. “Why?”

“Because I have daddy issues.” We laughed and got back to discussing our mothers.

The genesis of my relationship with Harry was constantly misreported. Harry and I were introduced by George Clooney, the British newspapers proclaimed, even though I’ve never met George Clooney. Yes, he was directing a film based on my memoir, but I’ve never been in the man’s presence, never communicated with him in any way. I wanted to correct the record, write an op-ed or something, tweet some facts. But no. I reminded myself: ghosts don’t speak. One day, though, I did share my frustration with Harry. I bemoaned that these fictions about me were spreading and hardening into orthodoxy. He tilted his head: Welcome to my world, dude. By now, Harry was calling me dude.

A week before its pub date, “Spare” was leaked. A Madrid bookshop reportedly put embargoed copies of the Spanish version on its shelves, “by accident,” and reporters descended. In no time, Fleet Street had assembled crews of translators to reverse-engineer the book from Spanish to English, and with so many translators working on tight deadline the results read like bad Borat. One example among many was the passage about Harry losing his virginity. Per the British press, Harry recounts, “I mounted her quickly . . .” But of course he doesn’t. I can assert with one-hundred-per-cent confidence that no one gets “mounted,” quickly or otherwise, in “Spare.”

I didn’t have time to be horrified. When the book was officially released, the bad translations didn’t stop. They multiplied. The British press now converted the book into their native tongue, that jabberwocky of bonkers hot takes and classist snark. Facts were wrenched out of context, complex emotions were reduced to cartoonish idiocy, innocent passages were hyped into outrages—and there were so many falsehoods. One British newspaper chased down Harry’s flight instructor. Headline: “Prince Harry’s army instructor says story in Spare book is ‘complete fantasy.’ ” Hours later, the instructor posted a lengthy comment beneath the article, swearing that those words, “complete fantasy,” never came out of his mouth. Indeed, they were nowhere in the piece, only in the bogus headline, which had gone viral. The newspaper had made it up, the instructor said, stressing that Harry was one of his finest students.

The only other time I’d witnessed this sort of frenzied mob was with LeBron James, whom I’d interviewed before and after his decision to leave the Cleveland Cavaliers and join the Miami Heat. I couldn’t fathom the toxic cloud of hatred that trailed him. Fans, particularly Cavs loyalists, didn’t just decry James. They wished him dead. They burned his jersey, threw rocks at his image. And the media egged them on. In those first days of “Spare,” I found myself wondering what the ecstatic contempt for Prince Harry and King James had in common. Racism, surely. Also, each man had committed the sin of publicly spurning his homeland. But the biggest factor, I came to believe, was money. In times of great economic distress, many people are triggered by someone who has so much doing anything to try to improve his lot.

Within days, the amorphous campaign against “Spare” seemed to narrow to a single point of attack: that Harry’s memoir, rigorously fact-checked, was rife with errors. I can’t think of anything that rankles quite like being called sloppy by people who routinely trample facts in pursuit of their royal prey, and this now happened every few minutes to Harry and, by extension, to me. In one section of the book, for instance, Harry reveals that he used to live for the yearly sales at TK Maxx, the discount clothing chain. Not so fast, said the monarchists at TK Maxx corporate, who rushed out a statement declaring that TK Maxx never has sales, just great savings all the time! Oh, snap! Gotcha, Prince George Santos! Except that people around the world immediately posted screenshots of TK Maxx touting sales on its official Twitter account. (Surely TK Maxx’s effort to discredit Harry’s memoir was unrelated to the company’s long-standing partnership with Prince Charles and his charitable trust.)

Ghostwriters don’t speak, I reminded myself over and over. But I had to do something. So I ventured one small gesture. I retweeted a few quotes from Mary Karr about inadvertent error in memories and memoir, plus seemingly innocuous quotes from “Spare” about the way Harry’s memory works. (He can’t recall much from the years right after his mother died, and for the most part remembers places better than people—possibly because places didn’t let him down the way people did.) Smooth move, ghostwriter. My tweets were seized upon, deliberately misinterpreted by trolls, and turned into headlines by real news outlets. Harry’s ghostwriter admits the book is all lies.

One of Harry’s friends gave a book party. My wife and I attended.

We were feeling fragile as we arrived, and it had nothing to do with Twitter. Days earlier, we’d been stalked, followed in our car as we drove our son to preschool. When I lifted him out of his seat, a paparazzo leaped from his car and stood in the middle of the road, taking aim with his enormous lens and scaring the hell out of everyone at dropoff. Then, not one hour later, as I sat at my desk, trying to calm myself, I looked up to see a woman’s face at my window. As if in a dream, I walked to the window and asked, “Who are you?” Through the glass, she whispered, “I’m from the Mail on Sunday.”

I lowered the shade, phoned an old friend—the same friend whose columns I used to ghostwrite in Colorado. He listened but didn’t get it. How could he get it? So I called the only friend who might.

It was like telling Taylor Swift about a bad breakup. It was like singing “Hallelujah” to Leonard Cohen. Harry was all heart. He asked if my family was O.K., asked for physical descriptions of the people harassing us, promised to make some calls, see if anything could be done. We both knew nothing could be done, but still. I felt gratitude, and some regret. I’d worked hard to understand the ordeals of Harry Windsor, and now I saw that I understood nothing. Empathy is thin gruel compared with the marrow of experience. One morning of what Harry had endured since birth made me desperate to take another crack at the pages in “Spare” that talk about the media.

Too late. The book was out, the party in full swing. As we walked into the house, I looked around, nervous, unsure of what state we’d find the author in. Was he, too, feeling fragile? Was he as keen as I was to organize a global boycott of TK Maxx?

He appeared, marching toward us, looking flushed. Uh-oh, I thought, before registering that it was a good flush. His smile was wide as he embraced us both. He was overjoyed by many things. The numbers, naturally. Guinness World Records had just certified his memoir as the fastest-selling nonfiction book in the history of the world. But, more than that, readers were reading, at last, the actual book, not Murdoched chunks laced with poison, and their online reviews were overwhelmingly effusive. Many said Harry’s candor about family dysfunction, about losing a parent, had given them solace.

The guests were summoned into the living room. There were several lovely toasts to Harry, then the Prince stepped forward. I’d never seen him so self-possessed and expansive. He thanked his publishing team, his editor, me. He mentioned my advice, to “trust the book,” and said he was glad that he did, because it felt incredible to have the truth out there, to feel—his voice caught—“free.” There were tears in his eyes. Mine, too.

And yet once a ghost, always a ghost. I couldn’t help obsessing about that word “free.” If he’d used that in one of our Zoom sessions, I’d have pushed back. Harry first felt liberated when he fell in love with Meghan, and again when they fled Britain, and what he felt now, for the first time in his life, was heard. That imperious Windsor motto, “Never complain, never explain,” is really just a prettified omertà, which my wife suggests might have prolonged Harry’s grief. His family actively discourages talking, a stoicism for which they’re widely lauded, but if you don’t speak your emotions you serve them, and if you don’t tell your story you lose it—or, what might be worse, you get lost inside it. Telling is how we cement details, preserve continuity, stay sane. We say ourselves into being every day, or else. Heard, Harry, heard—I could hear myself making the case to him late at night, and I could see Harry’s nose wrinkle as he argued for his word, and I reproached myself once more: Not your effing book.

But, after we hugged Harry goodbye, after we thanked Meghan for toys she’d sent our children, I had a second thought about silence. Ghosts don’t speak—says who? Maybe they can. Maybe sometimes they should.

Several weeks later, I was having breakfast with my family. The children were eating and my wife and I were talking about ghostwriting. Someone had just called, seeking help with their memoir. Intriguing person, but the answer was going to be no. I wanted to resume work on my novel. Our five-year-old daughter looked up from her cinnamon toast and asked, “What is ghostwriting?”

My wife and I gazed at each other as if she’d asked, What is God?

“Well,” I said, drawing a blank. “O.K., you know how you love art?”

She nodded. She loves few things more. An artist is what she hopes to be.

“Imagine if one of your classmates wanted to say something, express something, but they couldn’t draw. Imagine if they asked you to draw a picture for them.”

“I would do it,” she said.

“That’s ghostwriting.”

It occurred to me that this might be the closest I’d ever come to a workable definition. It certainly landed with our daughter. You could see it in her eyes. She got off her chair and leaned against me. “Daddy, I will be your ghostwriter.”

My wife laughed. I laughed. “Thank you, sweetheart,” I said.

But that wasn’t what I wanted to say. What I wanted to say was “No, Gracie. Nope. Keep doing your own pictures.” ♦

[lu-is-not-ok]

so like. not to be hongsang obsessed? But (if youve played and finished 4.5's story then read on, if u didnt then ignore this ask oops!!) did you see how yi sang and hong lu were standing next to eachother in the first episode🧍 d. id you see

like NOT to be one of those people where they look at two people standing next to eachother and go "oh my god they were standing next to eachother" But Also. Oh My God they were stanmding next to eachotge r

something associating them together DIRECTLY after canto IV's credits song illustration thing is making me (gripping desk so hard it splinters) im normal about this <3

i really hope that little section there is a sign we'll get to see more yi sang + hong lu interactions in future chapters or identity uptie stories.... though that just might be high hopes/my shipping goggles acting up lmao 😭 thoughts, if any?

and yi sang in general just watching out for his comrades more was just really really cute and uplifting!!!! i hope it turns out good for them.....yi sang smiling at heathcliff's return (from his talk with vergilius) made me 💥💥💥💥💥

also i might actually die for real if yi sang will interact with hong lu in some way with hong lu's song credit illustration thing to mirror canto IV's illust. i might Actually implode or maybe rupture a blood vessel /j

I don't think there's anything for me to add here, you just took my braincell and let me ghostwrite that ask.

[lia-land]

House of Flame and Shadow

3.5/5 stars

*Spoilers for House of Flame and Shadow by Sarah J. Maas

Is SJM incapable of killing characters and having them stay dead??? She really cheapens her writing by choosing to not kill off characters, especially when she has so many main ones. Her other series suffer from this as well. This whole book felt exactly like her other two series. Main character who acquires a position of power and there is a war. Three series with this exact premise. I’m bored. Is there really not more to the YA fantasy/romance genre than this? SJM loves ending with a war, and for the third time, it was so underwhelming. She needs to let go of war plots because she’s not that good at writing them and it leaves a bad final impression. Her writing just feels incredibly formulaic in this book, just as it did in A Court of Silver Flames. So many phrases are repeated and I couldn’t help feeling like it was almost written by AI because of how much of a pattern there was. There’s a difference between having a writing style and whatever this was. I was surprised by the ghostwriter claims until I read this book and can sort of understand it now. Compare this to the first two books in ACOTAR, or the first 2 in TOG. What happened to that author?

My second issue with this book is that ACOTAR was used as a marketing tactic to get more readers for this series. I was hoping for more Rhys and Feyre. Any Feyre. There was such a good opportunity for SJM to make this the most amazing crossover and it wasn’t executed well. I understand that this is not an ACOTAR book, but if I hadn’t read ACOTAR, I would be so bored during most of the interactions between Nesta, Bryce, and Azriel. Actually, even having read and loved that series, I wasn’t that entertained. I want more, and not in the good way that derives from me enjoying it so much that I want more, but because there was so much potential here. Instead, it was just a ploy to get more money specifically for CC. I say this because all the crossover chapters seemed to only exist to attract ACOTAR readers to CC, but there was nothing in the writing that was there to attract CC readers to ACOTAR. Had I not read ACOTAR, I’d still have zero interest in the characters and their world after this book. This was written for a very specific audience. Publishing is a business, after all.

I did like seeing how the Night Court IC comes across to those outside the IC. Again, this is something that I only cared about because I’ve read the ACOTAR series. There’s also a bunch of big spoilers for ACOTAR, so I feel like SJM should have maybe specified that you should read the Crescent City series after, but as I said before, the aim of the crossover wasn’t to attract readers to ACOTAR. Just to CC.

I didn’t like Bryce in this book. She felt like a copy of Aelin from Throne of Glass and I’ve explained in reviews of that series why I dislike her. For a non-spoilery summary: she’s very annoying and has too many secret plans and SJM doesn’t know how to execute that well or when to realize that it’s repetitive. She does it in this series, too. Bryce in the cave in Avallen was so incredibly annoying. I loved that Sathia put her in her place. Even Hunt was annoying in Avallen. I almost wanted to DNF the book during those chapters. And why was Bryce suddenly queen of the fae… that was so random and out of character for her. Just very repetitive of SJM’s other books, as I mentioned above.

Tharion was probably the most consistent character throughout this series. He kind of felt like a copy of Thorne from the Lunar Chronicles. He was the only one who kept surprising me. I think, generally, the fandom seems to think he constantly makes bad choices, but I think that’s a very simplified view. He had to go to the Viper Queen or he would have been a prisoner underwater forever. He had to escape the Ocean Queen and follow the others to Avallen because it’s likely that the Ocean Queen would have given him to the other queens to maintain peace. His reasoning for marrying Sathia also made sense. I think the unspoken reasoning there was that he knew the others might have considered ditching him because they wouldn’t want the other queens on their trails and part of him might have thought that marrying Sathia would mean that they couldn’t cut him off. He felt the most realistic to me.

I still can’t find a reason to care about Ithan. The only real purpose he actually had in this book was so that we could learn more about Jesiba. I didn’t care about the wolves storyline at all and it was so underwhelming. Those chapters felt unnecessary and more like a set up for future series. Like what was the point of Ithan’s character?

I said this in my review of HOEAB and also in most of my TOG reviews: these last minute ‘plans’ and ‘reveals’ are unbearable. When Jesiba suddenly and conveniently explained the amulet thing and saving Bryce’s life, I had to roll my eyes. I won’t digress here, though, as I have said all I need to say on this in previous reviews.

My overall take is that I would have enjoyed SJM’s books a lot more if I hadn’t read all 16 back to back. I’ve just spent the past 3 and a half months reading three variations of the same story and characters. I loved the main three ACOTAR books and was chasing that feeling, but her other books didn’t match up. It seems to be an issue within publishing in general that authors seem to be rushing stories just to get them published. The first two ACOTAR books, especially, had me so hooked. I was hoping for stories of that quality. Perhaps it’s unfair to compare, but SJM pretty much set up the groundwork for that when she chose to use the Night Court crossover as a marketing tactic. I think this series could have stood on its own and would have been better off without the crossover.

In saying all this, I will most likely be reading any future SJM books because I’m invested in the worlds, but I hope we get back the same writing and story quality as the beginning of ACOTAR.

[sickenoughsteve]

Beef, Bars, and Banter: Navigating the Drake vs. Kendrick Feud and the Hilarity Ensuing

When I first came across Pop Base’s prompt to write something for their newsletter based on modern-day pop culture, like Drake, I wanted to hire a ghostwriter. 

Allegedly! Anyway…

I went to ChatGPT to see if I could streamline the process and create something funny, witty, and on-trend without spending too much time. It didn’t work at all. What came out (with specific prompts, even) was incredibly corny and very clearly written by AI. This is why we need REAL writers to be compensated fairly and given the correct resources to entertain and inform us properly.

Anyway, that’s my little rant on writing. But let’s go back to Drake. Right now, this man is getting cooked by the entire industry, yet it seems he’s holding his own? Whether our favorite cornball, who everyone admits is actually somewhat appealing in a way none of us can explain, is your favorite, or if you like the Pulitzer Prize winner, Kendrick, you must tip your hat to the revival of beef in the rap game.

This is fun!

I mean, The Weeknd is out here singing sultry diss bars, Future is butt-hurt for what seems to be the first time ever, Metro Boomin is catching strays simply because he’s good at making beats but doesn’t rap, Rick Ross is on IG calling Drake “whiteboy”, J Cole avoided a massacre but might have lost some respect in the process, Pusha T is somewhere saying “I told you so,” Kanye is continuing to be his same insane self… even Quavo and Chris Brown are getting intensely and perhaps almost violently disrespectful on the undercard for this headliner beef.

That said, rather than diving into this beef from all angles, I want to acknowledge that this is a lot of information to digest, and many battles are going on in this war. That’s why I will do my very best to give a bird’s-eye view of this whole situation and see if this perspective can help all of us enjoy it for what it is. Not necessarily to tell you who to “support” but rather to recognize that negativity might save us in 2024.

We’re missing pop culture events that unite and get us all thinking about the same things. That’s where I believe Kendrick and Drake are doing a massive service to hip-hop. Putting it all on the line gives us something great to sink our teeth into. I, for one, love it.

So, as far as comparing this beef to past beefs, I remember in middle school, hearing Nas on ‘Ether.’ It rocked my world. I was raised on Nas and thought of him as the ultimate rapper. A rapper’s rapper. Instantaneously upon hearing “Fuck Jay Z” several times in succession on the song, I became a bonafide 100% Jay Z hater.

Did I have a problem with Jay? Not really. He was a star. I liked his music and had absolutely no issues with him. But not anymore! Nas had set the stage for me to learn as much as possible about Jay Z and become skeptical of everything about him.

This time around, the same feeling is back. However, it’s even weirder because the internet is out here internetting. Drake has a team of social media people who ensure he has the best and most impactful content strategy any rapper in a beef could ask for.

The internet is all about timing and trolling. Drake and his team are certainly better equipped there. And it’s showing to be necessary. However, one could argue if the bars are all that matters, Kendrick might have him beat there. Hence, the need for Drake to win these small battles on social media.

I think the best thing about beef between world-class musicians is that we are instantaneously reminded that everybody is insecure and we all make mistakes. The goal of beef is to expose those missteps and air out those insecurities. Before, I never would have guessed Drake had a BBL, fake abs, and other body modifications. Does that make me hate him? Not really. Does it even bother me? No. Does it make me think he’s very weird? Hell yeah.

In this politically correct world, toxic masculinity makes a resounding comeback whenever rap beef is declared. That’s probably the most upsetting thing about this all, but at the same time, let me reiterate that it’s fun. In a world of Israel and Palestine headlines, one of the most significant elections of our history, climate issues, and other general sad, sad truths, this is something we quite certainly NEED.

Silly bullying.

Drake making fun of Kendrick’s shoe size is, frankly, hilarious. I don’t care at all that Kendrick is short. Why would I? It doesn’t matter one bit. But if you put it on a song, it’s GOING to be funny. But of course, he refers to him as “midget” a few too many times for our PC culture to be happy with him. I found this most interesting when stepping back and thinking about it all. To come across as “real” also means NOT being politically correct.

Drake came for Kendrick for making music with Taylor Swift. Meanwhile, he’s in a commercial singing and dancing to Taylor. Is working with one of the biggest stars of all time something you should be ashamed of? Clearly not. But it’s not manly. So we have to be embarrassed by it. Beef is confusing in 2024; that’s all I’m saying.

And Kendrick isn’t guilt-free, either. He told Drake he doesn’t like it when he says the N-word. Of course, Drake has a black father but was primarily raised by his white mother. Now, he must feel bad about using our culture’s most controversial word. Of course, there’s a lot a sociology professor could unpack about why this is wrong, but in rap beef, it’s fair game. And it works as a way to poke holes in Drizzy's entire being! So it plays.

Another thing. Before we had Rap Genius and could look up what these guys were saying, some more subtle jabs would go under the radar. But now, the whole thing—from Kendrick naming the song ‘Euphoria’ because of the HBO show Drake is a producer on—and the connection there to pedophilia to Drake calling his diss ‘Push Ups’—there’s simply lore everywhere you look.

I used to write for a company that covered Marvel/DC, comics in general, and action franchises, and the main thing I took away from it was that people love Easter Eggs. We love digging into the material and finding references to the past or things meant to not just be on the surface. That’s what we love most about rap beef - especially nowadays.

We want to make discoveries about these greats that make them less untouchable, to bring them down a peg. Interestingly, human nature is to humiliate those on top whenever possible. 

But alas.

So, whether you “don’t trust” Drake or love and agree that he’s winning this 20v1, you must admit this is “for the culture” and far from over. So buckle up; this will be a hilarious and fun ride.

[sufficientlylargen]

I mean, "ghostwriter" seems to cover a pretty wide set of things, ranging from "J. Random Writer and K. Alfred Famousguy collaborated on this book, and J did more of the writing but it was published as 'By K. Famousguy (with J. Writer)'" all the way to "J wrote this book entirely on their own and it was published as 'By K. Famousguy' with no mention of J whatsoever, and K and J both signed NDAs promising to never reveal the truth", and I think the ethics of these different cases differ widely.

But I don't think it's unreasonable to argue that ''telling readers person K wrote this book when they didn't" is unethical regardless of whether

K paid OpenAI to write it

K paid another human to write it

Another human paid K to pretend they wrote it, or

K bartered with Satan, who wrote it

We all agree, right?

AI to write your novel is wrong

A bargain with a demon to write your novel is okay

[luciferpanini]

Yo I fucking love your swap AU the mental image of Mafuyu who tries to make ppl happy but just Does Not Understand Humor is cracking me up also do you have like, backstories and stuff for how Tsukasa and Nene ended up The Way They Did?

Tsukasa fell down seven flights of stairs and was never the same afterward. /j /j /j

I do!!! But I also,, kind of don't,, :')

As in like!! I have vague ideas in my head but it's rlly hard to put them into words. They're often unsteady too so most of the time I'm not too too sure about what comes out of my mouth.

ramble under the cut yeah.

To keep it short and simple.

Nene:

After quitting her old theater troupe, Nene started her activity as an utaite under the name "Deep Sea Diva" (深海の歌姫). Despite giving up on becoming a musical actress, she still wished to continue singing, and not having to show her face or stand in front of an audience meant her stage fright would be less of a problem. Kanade invited her to join Niigo after listening to her cover of one of their songs. So she became their main vocalist and mixer.

She honestly tries really hard to convince herself that things are fine the way they are and she's satisfied with her situation, that she has no reasons to want more. Her whole character arc would be accepting that she still wants to become an actress and finding the courage to pursue her dreams again. Because as of now Nene thinks of herself as selfish and not knowing her limits every time the slight thought of her past aspirations cross her mind. jfsdkjf It's rlly straightforward for a Nene story!

Her Nightcord username is NenengaV!!

Tsukasa:

He's perfectly fucked up just the way he is, he just needs a wee little nudge. (⌒‿⌒)

He started thinking for 5 seconds and it ruined his life. /j

"Why am I doing this... why do I not remember????"

Anyway, his SEKAI for him is basically "a place where I'm needed" and judging by how it's completely desolated with only Miku, you can kinda tell how he perceives his own self-worth.

In the AU, Saki actually got transferred to the same hospital Kanade's father stays at, so that's how they met!! Idk how to explain this but he pretty much Tenma'd Kanade into tolerating his class clown behaviors.

Saki said "I think I want to become an idol when I'm healthy" once and he internalised it to hell and back as something completely different.

Even though he did help Kanade with making music, he effectively functioned as an assistant ghostwriter to K until Ena and Nene joined.

"who the fuck is that?" "that's tsukasa, he helps with the lyrics and instrumentals sometimes." "who????"

His Nightcord username is literally just "Tsukasa", he's going to get doxxed one day.

His spine is constantly hurting from sleeping on the SEKAI's floor and his energy level is at a constant low. People say he has a habit of "disappearing" because he would be weaseling his way into the SEKAI any chance he gets.

She'll wake up any time now...

[mrsgiovanna]

Beautiful Bria...

You will never read this. Whether this is just a means to appease my own conscience or a way to remember you before me... it doesn't matter. You're with me, in my home, and life is wonderful. How you arrived here isn't important, only that you're here. Villains and heros are concepts that exist in fiction, to others I may be that horrible person who took that brat's girl, but this is my story and I simply claimed a girl who was rightfully mine... The means doesn't matter, only the affection you currently lavish me with does... it's like I always said... You'd learn to love me cara, and now the lesson is finally complete...

(Ooof feel free to ignore, I just had a thought after our last conversation 😂🤌🏻🥲)

The girl stood at the doorway, nervously playing with the hem of her shirt. Having caught the attention of the Don, she inched closer at his request, the sight of her alone had relaxed his frown and furrowed eyebrows.

"What's got you so upset, 'colo, is it about what happened earlier?" She asked, cupping the sides of his face. He looked up at her warm brown eyes, gently theading his fingers through her hair. "It's not you my angel, it will never be you.. " he replied, his voice taking on a timbre even he was unaccustomed to. Niccolo continued , "how are you feeling my love?" Bri averted her gaze before answering that she was okay and profusely apologizing for snapping at him earlier on in the day. "Shhh, it's okay... I should have been more sensitive, it's not easy trying to remember your past... " he said while ghosting his thumb over her bottom lip.

"But-"

"But nothing, it's in the past, my only concern is our future... let's go somewhere nice tonight? You'll find something very pretty left in our room... put it on and be ready in an hour? " Bria had left him with a smile and a kiss to his cheek. Niccolo turned his attention back to his computer screen and closed the files he had opened, before leaving to join his most prized acquisition.

[Omg this has been in my box for so long lol, j hope I did this justice, also please ghostwrite all my yandere stuff, kthanx byeeee]

[kob131]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3vYbF3_TAk

I tried watching JelloApocolaypse’s video on RWBY again.

... Yeah, just as bad as before.

A. The conflict with the Grimm is not the plot of the story. It’s just the backstory.

B. “Haha look! RWBY added in something at the last minute! Ain;t that stupid?” *looks behind him to see Dragon Ball posters*.

C. “Haha Naruto reference!” Because eye powers are unique to Naruto and this isn’t an overdone cliche.

D. “Hur dur, Weiss hate Ruby!” No she doesn’t. That stopped being a thing by the end of Volume 1.

E. “Weiss loses every fight!” Except for the White Trailer...and V1 E8...and V1 E10...and V2 E4...and V2 E12...and V3 E1...and V3 E11.

F. “BLAKE BLAND!” So is your humor.

G. “FANAUS INCONSISTENT!” And yet you call yourself an animator...

H. “THEY NO EXPLORE SIDE CHARACTERS” *Shows Emerald, Sun and Velvet*

I. “SHOW NO ABOUT CHARACTERS, FIGHTS!’ Yes the fights that even in the early Volumes were used to punctuate character arcs and conflicts...which means it is about the characters.

J. “BUTTMETAL!” ... RWBY uses Rock.

K. “ANIMATION BAD!” Congrats, you said literally the most generic compliant about RWBY ever.

L. “PYRRHA MARKED FOR DEATH!” ... You didn’t even mention her namesake being the origin of the term “Pyrrhic Victory”.

M. “ADAM THE WORST!” ... ... ... That’s it. You didn’t even make a joke about him being a bull Fanaus, you just treated him like a dog.

N. “DUST NOT MAGIC?!” Wow, you’d just die if someone tried explaining the Nasuverse to you huh?

O. “WRITERS FORGOT STOLEN DUST?!” What do you think the bombs had in them to explode? The unmentioned gunpowder?

P. “MAGIC EXIST BUT IT INCONSISTENT!” Since when have we seen people casually throw firebombs everywhere?

Q. “THEY FORGOT!” Yes, your ghostwriters did forget.

R. “WOR HOMEWORK” Wow, don’t let this guy near Tolkien or else his brain will break.

S. “RWBY CHIBI BETTTER!” If by better you shallow and less consistent. To translate this- imagine if someone argued that the first Summer Event used Arturia better than the mainline game in FGO.

T. “PLOT SLOW” So is Berserk’s. Wanna try swinging at that?

U. “MOMMY SALAMI!” This is literally a little kid’s joke.

V. “4 and 5 BAD!” ... Wouldn’t that make it more attractive to smack talk then? If they’re so much worse then why is this 60% Volumes 1-3 and 40% Vague? ... It’s because the bitching becomes inconsistent and impossible to generalize after Volume 3 so you can’t just make generic jokes to pander, isn’t it?

W. “OZPIN MORALLY GREY BUT HE NO DO GREY STUFF!” *sees this is made after Volume 6* Ah huh. Sure. Whatever. I can buy that.

X. “FUNNY MAN SAY BIRD!” Your humor is more shallow than Chibi’s.

Y. “THEY NO ADVANCE PLOT!” I love that this is shoved in with a ‘Wasted potential’ joke because if they picked up the pace, that means less time for that ‘potential’ of yours.

Z. “BUMBLEBY NOT BUILT UP!” 

Me: *remembers the backlash of this part* Ha! The only laugh of the whole video and it was at his misery.

Why is this just not funny? Because comedy is all about sudden subversion. Laughter is a gut reaction to sudden changes to indicate that everything’s fine. It’s why insane laughter is so dissonant. And all Jello says is the same shit you’ve heard before. There is no subversion despite pretending there is. You will see every joke coming and thus you’ll just be bored.

But hey, at least he fucked up mocking a flawed show. It’s not like he completely missed the point of a truly great series. Nope, not once.

[axjake]

ax for the ask game!!! and cassie!

Ax

• favorite thing about them: Ax is honestly the dichotomy between his character. One moment he can be eating popcorn off the floor and the next he’s agonizing over choosing between loyalty to his own people and loyalty to his friends. I love how silly and fun he can be, and I love how serious his values are to him. Things like loyalty, honor, and justice.

• least favorite thing about them: Ableism :| that sure was a choice the ghostwriter made in book 40. I don’t like the imperialist/nationalist attitudes but his character is a critique on them too so I don’t hate that about his character I just think he should get well soon

• favorite line: “So, did you know that the cream separator was invented in 1878?” NO I did NOT know that thank you Ax you’re doing amazing sweetie

• brOTP: I really like his friendship with Tobias, them connecting over both being outcasts and living in the woods together. And then later on finding out they’re family, it’s just… Ax is the first actually decent family Tobias has and it’s so sweet even though they’re forced to be child soldiers together

• OTP: hmmmmm. This one is so hard. /j

Anyways fellas is it gay to follow a guy you barely know into battle and time and time again choose him over your own people and refer to him as prince so often despite it not being necessary that it becomes an inside joke between you. Is it gay to be the first one to notice he’s been replaced by an alien despite having known him for the shortest amount of time. Is it gay to tell him you’ll stand by him no matter what while he clutches your hand and tells you to go home in an emotionally charged moment. FELLAS,

That being said axmarco is also cute

• nOTP: Besides the obvious, I don’t really like pairing him with a woman because I headcanon him as gay + experiencing comphet because Ax is really bad at interpreting his own emotions. Though this is a personal hc so obviously it’s fine if other people don’t share it.

• Random headcanon: I think him and Tobias are both autistic but experience it in different ways so they get to bond over it. I mean obviously the autistic-coded alien is a problematic trope but I’m rubbing my little autistic hands all over it because I think aliens are sick.

Also he is so nonbinary to me

• unpopular opinion: Hmmm. I don’t know. Idk if this is unpopular but I think he was completely justified in hating Cassie towards the end of the series, even though her actions were ultimately for the best. Honestly I was yelling at Cassie when she gave away the morphing cube

• song I associate with them: blue lips by regina spektor and mowgli’s road by marina

• favorite picture of them: I’m too lazy to find it rn but that one in the comic where he’s baby. Help he’s so tiny

Cassie

• favorite thing about them: I like how thoughtful she is and how she always holds out hope for things to be better. I feel like a lot of the kids just give that up in favor of doing what they have to, and I like that she still looks for ways out of that.

• least favorite thing about them: If I knew her irl I might find it a bit annoying that the environment was the thing she cared about most and not human life. Also sometimes her morals are flaky and inconsistent. Like I really appreciate her role in the group of trying to be the voice of reason and keeping the others from going too far, but sometimes she’s bringing things up for that reason and not because she has an actual moral issue

• favorite line: idk but I like when she throws a snake at Marco for being sexist about the hork-bajir. Queen.

• brOTP: Rachel. Rachel. Rachel. The dynamic between them is so good. They’re so opposed in basically every way but it doesn’t matter. They have an extremely important bond and they’re trying so hard not to let the war take that away from them. *clenches fist* dear god

• OTP: I don’t feel very strongly about many Cassie ships but I like Rachel/Cassie a lot, I think their dynamic as friends carries well into a ship, and Cassie obviously has some very gay moments towards Rachel and vice versa… they admire each other so much

• nOTP: Cassie and Aftran. I’m sorry, but Aftran is stated to be an adult and it feels weird when people ignore that to ship them together. Plus even beyond that, I’d rather deconstruct what Aftran means for the war and for the yeerks than do shipping. Sometimes the themes of a story are more important than finding two characters to kiss, and I actually really like that romantic relationships take a backseat in animorphs

• random headcanon: After the war Cassie was the only one to get therapy and actually work through her trauma

• unpopular opinion: Cassie shouldn’t have been skinny in the visual novel. She’s described as chubby in the books and it’s lowkey weird that the artist doesn’t include that

• song I associate with them: all of Nine Inch Nails I think it’s so funny that she told her parents it stands for Nice Is Neat. Gaslight gatekeep girlboss

[hahahax30]

Ohh maybe if Effie turns out to be around the merry thieve’s age, it’ll be like how Gideon and Sophie were. Only I don’t think Matthew’s arc will be fully developed romantically since there’s so much other stuff to work out for him and there’s only so much space in the last book.

It might be like a few characters notice ~sparks~ between them towards the end of CoT and then in the future CC writes content centering post-TLH Matthew and we see some of that in there?

I mean I can see Cassie wanting to parallel/repeat the “rich boy gets amusingly humbled by relatable maid who the entire fandom ends up loving.” I would probably expect it if not for the fact that Sophie was much more developed and a much more significant part of the story by the end of Clockwork Prince than Effie was by the end of Chain of Iron.

Interesting idea I guess! Though, Matthew of course doesn’t have to be loved by/love everyone. This is more just because I thought of the Gideon/Sophie parallel and we know how much CC loves parallels

(And I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want a different but just as entertaining version of the scone scene to happen 😂)

Honestly, I think Matthew's a tough character to guess about. The general consensus is that he'll recover from his alcoholism (because Cassie's not going to doom a bisexual teen who's struggling with a serious issue she already killed Elias for) and that maybe he'll become a downworlder in the process. But his romantic life? Nada.

I really enjoyed Sophideon the first time I read TID, so I'd love to see a similar relationship (perhaps preferably with the gender reversed, but a girl can dream) between Matthew and Effie; especially since Effie's much more outspoken than Sophie was and Matthew and her would make a hilarious couple. And while that may seem unlikely because of the complexity of Matthew's character AND the scarce dwelling on Effie's own, Chain of Thorns is going to be 900+ pages. So if in a 400-pages book Cassie managed to create Gabrily (when Cecily was only introduced in passing), as well as solve the whole Herongraystairs drama, I believe she can arrange a partner for Matthew (while solving Arianna's, Thomastair's, Ghostwriter's and Jordelia's own shit shows and get Grace and Kit together --but that's another story).

Obviously, Matthew does not need to be with someone to have a happy ending --no one does. However, TLH is both YA and a Cassandra Clare trilogy: a canonically non-aromantic character somewhat influential to the story is most likely going to end up with someone. And to be honest, I love the idea of Matthew finding true, requited love in COT for a couple reasons:

Cassie did say that before Matthew allows himself to start a committed relationship with anyone he first needs to love himself, so Matthew with a partner = Matthew loves himself.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: I don't want Charles to carry the Fairchild line. As much as people may hate him, I'm deeply uncomfortable with the prospect of a gay man marrying a woman and having children with her; it is both unfair to him and to the hypothetical wife. Matthew is bisexual: it would be better if he fathered the next generation of Fairchilds (obviously for this he'd have to get together with a woman, but since we're talking about Effie being his partner...)

But who knows? I'm new to the whole speculation thing (the Effie/Matthew thing was just half-joking, lol). Matthew could very well end Chain of Thorns alone but happy, be the protagonist of the bind-up novella, and then get together with someone nice who definitely isn't Effie.

(Or he could become a downworlder and get together with Anush in TWP /j)

Anyways, I'm afraid this answer has been waaaaaaay longer than you expected. Sorry for ranting :)

[moonlightreal]

Strange Fate linkdump: Questing, Empathy and Endgames

Huge long post!  Linkdump and many many thoughts that wandered through my mind while going through these links.

Last Lullaby stuff:

https://www.thebookseller.com/news/hachette-signs-new-l-j-smith

About the international licensing of The Last Lullaby in 2013.  Strange Fate is the big obvious lost book but it’s not the only one.

https://booknode.com/the_last_lullaby_0705503

French bookseller page about The Last Lullaby, with back cover blurb in English but no cover picture.  So whatever happened happened before an artist could be commissioned. The book seems to follow unscarred teen Brionwy rather than scarred child Crispy who we met in the Strange Fate chapter

https://spotlightreport.net/featured/burn-bright-presents-l-j-smith-interview

2013 interview about The Last Lullaby.  In this interview Crispy and Brionwy are two different characters, though I’d always had the impression that they were the same person and Brionwy was Crispy’s real name.  Maybe just because Brionwy is the name in the title and then it’s Crispy’s story, back in whatever first incarnation I read of it whatever incarnation that was.  And it’s poetic nfor the scarred child to have a beautiful name.  

So we have the short story Brionwy’s Lullaby about Brionwy in the harem and the Strange Fate chapter about Crispy in the ruins.  Two pieces.  Less than we have of Strange Fate, but there is a looooot of worldbuilding in Brionwy’s Lullaby.  Lots of worldbuilding but no hint of where the story goes next.  Do Brionwy and Crispy meet?  Is there some connection between them?  How does the story end?  In the Strange Fate incarnation of the story this future is traded for a happier timeline when characters in our time avert the apocalypse but as a separate story how would it conclude?

Honestly I’m sadder about this book than I am about Strange Fate; I loves me some YA dystopias and the whole dragons and vampires thing is just neat.  But this book’s as lost as lost can be.

Recent Stuff:

https://www.reddit.com/r/YAlit/comments/krlvr1/lj_smiths_night_world/

Reddit thread from two months ago.  The rabbit hole is real and nobody else seems to have found the bottom.

https://deadline.com/2020/05/greg-berlanti-productions-adapt-the-forbidden-game-novels-lj-smith-as-tv-series-the-vampire-diaries-author-1202944224/

Article about the upcoming Forbidden Game TV series.  Forbidden Game is a Simon & Schuster series, not Alloy, so while I’m sure Ms. Smith has no say in how the show will go she will at least get royalties!  However much royalties book authors get from TV shows, no idea how much that is.  

https://micky.com.au/the-vampire-diaries-writer-reveals-new-fantasy-horror-series-the-forbidden-game/

“LJ Smith has just revealed that its horror trilogy novels...”  Um.  Not quite.

I looked through half a dozen articles about the Forbidden Game TV series and none of them had anything from Ms. Smith.  I knew the chance that this would draw comment from her was only a tiny chance, but it seemed worth looking.  

Interviews and Stuff:

https://www.saltlakemagazine.com/qa-the-vampire-diaries-creator-l-j-smith-on-writing-and-losing-the-series/

2012 interview about Vampire Diaries

https://peoplepill.com/people/l-j-smith-1

Just a biography page.  

http://theliteraryconnoisseur.blogspot.com/2014/05/an-interview-with-new-york-times.html

2014 interview with a blogger.  Ms. Smith does seem to be an absolutely lovely person.

https://areiterowski.wordpress.com/2013/02/10/author-profile-l-j-smith/

2013 Blog post about Ms. Smith, ending with a quite long list of “things she’s currently working on.’ the medical stuff didn’t happen until 2015 though with six projects in progress it’s believeable that she didn’t finish any of them before being felled by illness in 2015.

http://luanatormesdemattos.blogspot.com/2013/11/interview-with-one-and-only-l-j-smith.html

2013 interview with a blogger.

Into the meta: Aubrey Clark and the ghostwritten books

https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/5760167.Aubrey_Clark

Books by Aubrey Clark.  Secret Circle and Vampire Diaries.  I assumed Aubrey Clark is a woman and the other book listed is by a man with the same name, but Aubrey is traditionally a male name and modernly a female name so who knows. Hardly the first time a dude wrote a series aimed at girls under a female name.

https://www.romance.io/authors/54558f9b87eac323ffb2cc31/aubrey-clark

Bio listing Ms. Clark as a she, and classifying her books as romances.  Says she’s been writing for eight years.  Just on the VD/SC stuff or did she write before?  Alloy hiring an existing writer to ghostwrite and that existing writer using a pen name so her new work wouldn’t be connected with her old work is perfectly possible.  I swear I read somewhere that Ms. Clark was Ms. Smith’s editor, or her “person” with Alloy, making her signing on as ghostwriter a bit of a betrayal… but I can’t find my source.

And how much of a betrayal is it really, if Ms. Smith got fired it’s not Ms. Clark’s fault if the series got offered to her, and who could say no to getting to write for a series you know?  It’s a job and a chance to be a published author and nobody should be judged for grabbing that candy if offered it.  

I wish we could hear what happened from Aubrey Clark’s side, just because the story of What Happened to Strange Fate is a mystery I to figure out… it’s easy for me to forget this mystery isn’t a Nancy Drew video game, it’s people’s real lives.  Ms. Clark is not the villain, she’s a writer in a situation we don’t fully understand but she’s just a writer like any writer.

http://debrasbookcafe.blogspot.com/2012/11/book-review-secret-circlethe-divide-by.html

Review of Secret Circle: The Divide

http://bookandbroadway.blogspot.com/2016/02/the-temptation-tsc-6-by-aubrey-clark.html

Review of Secret Circle: The Temptation.  The reviewer was not impressed.

http://yepireadbooks.blogspot.com/2013/04/book-32-temptation.html

Another review of The Temptation.  This reviewer was a bit more impressed than the last one.  I admit I ragequit the ghostwritten books after Ms. Clark started killing off characters, I don’t remember if I even hit book two…  

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/The_Vampire_Diaries_(novel_series)

Publishing history of Vampire Diaries

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304058204579495491652398358

2014 “Vampire Diaries Writer Bites Back.” we’ve all read this one...

https://uniquelygeekygirl.com/2013/05/20/1223/

2013 “LJ Smith vs ghostwriter” from a blog called uniquely geeky girl.  The next article on the blog is more about Alloy and its practice of hiring ghostwriters.

The Rise and Fall of Kindle Worlds:

https://the-digital-reader.com/2018/05/15/amazon-to-shut-down-kindle-worlds/

https://fanlore.org/wiki/Kindle_Worlds

https://www.thebookloft.com/fanfiction-and-kindle-worlds

https://www.hiddengemsbooks.com/amazon-closes-kindle-worlds/

https://gigaom.com/2014/08/17/amazons-fan-fiction-portal-kindle-worlds-is-a-bust-for-fans-and-for-writers-too/

https://www.wired.com/2013/05/kindle-worlds-fanfic-copyright/

http://www.roxannestclaire.com/barefoot-bay-world-kindle/kindle-worlds-faq/

https://www.bustle.com/articles/36237-amazons-fan-fiction-site-kindle-worlds-is-flopping-but-why

It rose, and it fell.  As far as I can tell Alloy is the only publisher to put its works out on Kindle Worlds, I guess because that’s what they were already doing with their hired authors!  Other authors seem to have opened their worlds individually and I guess not many of them signed on.  

LJ Smith and Kindle Worlds

https://www.theawl.com/2014/02/the-writer-who-beat-the-system-how-one-woman-resurrected-her-sexy-vampire-brothers/

https://www.mhpbooks.com/fired-vampire-diaries-writer-takes-to-kindle-worlds-for-revenge/

http://floor-to-ceiling-books.blogspot.com/2011/02/l-j-smith-fired-from-writing-vampire.html

A blog post with some comments so you can read the state of the fandom at the time.

https://www.dailydot.com/parsec/fandom/vampire-diaries-lj-smith-kindle-fanfiction/

http://leegoldberg.com/tag/alloy-entertainment/

“Read the contract.’  This one is interesting because it’s the only one that isn’t in defense of Ms. Smith.  She should indeed read her contracts unless she wants to just be a fanfic writer, which… I don’t think I’ve ever heard of an author going from published to fanfic, but why not?  

Also, good question, where was Ms. Smith’s agent?  And where is Ms. Smith’s agent these days when someone should maybe be being the Strange Fate Police?  

Unrelated: I swear I read an article from Alloy’s perspective about what happened.  Maybe it was this one and I thought it was from Alloy when it wasn’t.  It is the only article not in support of Ms. Smith that I could find.

https://editingeverything.com/blog/2014/04/25/fanfiction-is-letting-lj-smith-tell-her-vampire-diaries-story/

https://www.tvovermind.com/vampire-diaries-lj-smith-fired-book-series/

https://thegameofnerds.com/2018/03/03/originals-10-facts-about-the-woman-behind-the-vamps/

https://dc.uwm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1952&context=etd

https://www.cbr.com/the-secret-circle-why-the-vampire-diaries-author-l-j-smiths-other-cw-series-failed/

I watched one episode of the Secret Circle series because I loved the books so much, but the CW style is not my jam.  But it is interesting to read the pitch for a fewer-character second season.

https://anovelbookblog.com/2014/06/12/leeching-off-the-talent-writing-for-hire-the-dark-side-of-publishing/

About the Secret Circle sequel novels and Alloy

https://www.jeanienefrost.com/2019/02/ghosts-in-the-machine/

Ghostwriting and plagiarism and ethics.

https://www.fanpop.com/clubs/stefan-and-elena/articles/94267/title/lj-smith-fired-from-writing-own-novels

This is the full letter from Ms. Smith about getting fired.

https://teleread.com/thanks-to-kindle-worlds-fired-vampire-diaries-writer-continues-her-own-series-as-fanfic/index.html

http://iswimforoceans.blogspot.com/2011/02/help-lj-smith-vampire-diaries.html

2011 blog post

https://indecisiveturtle.wordpress.com/2014/05/29/assignment-4-ghostwriting-in-the-vampire-diaries-by-l-j-smith/

A long blog post that goes into detail about the writing of some of the books, how to tell Ms. Smith’s style from the ghostwriter’s, sentence length and similes and stuff, all very academic!  I’ve retyped a couple pieces of Ms. Smith’s writing and I noticed she handles punctuation-with-quotes differently than I do, making it very weird to retype.  This is an interesting one.  Someone dived way deep!

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/10/19/the-gossip-mill

New Yorker article about Alloy

https://www.publishingcrawl.com/2012/05/29/the-not-so-secret-backdoor-to-publishing/

Article about Alloy and package writing

https://www.vogue.com/article/the-secret-circle-young-adult-witch-fiction

Just an article about the Secret Circle books and how they’re kinda bad but actually good.  Which they are.

That’ll keep y’all busy for a while!

Quest wishlist: I wish we could ask someone in the publishing industry about rights to series and rights to “publication canceled” books and how all that stuff works.  And I wish we could hear Aubrey Clark’s side of the story, but it just seems unkind to reach out to her to ask about this.

But the problem is… I call it “the quest for Strange Fate” because I’m melodramatic and like calling things quests, but what it the victory condition for this one?   The obvious: we win if we find and read Strange Fate, but I don’t think that will ever happen.  No matter how much we learn about what happened that won’t make Strange Fate appear.  

I do wish we could tell LJ Smith that plenty of authors these days have a Patreon.  If the people who still care about the lost books and the story of Ms. Smith could turn that caring into actual useful help for the people and maybe the books too that would be the best outcome.  That would be a successful quest.    

A darker timeline possibility: maybe S&S read Strange Fate and it wasn’t any good. Ms. Smith is a good writer.  But take a good writer and give her 20 years off from writing, and make those the 20 years where the teen experience of life changed radically, her genres of choice became big and popular and evolved and built up tropes, and language itself did… things…

I stan language but it’s a little sus how new lettery bois go brr everywhere I look.  I love it, but it’s humbling having to ask my niece what all the new words mean, and why so many of them seem to begin with S!

And Ms. Smith is sixty and has twenty years of rewriting Strange Fate, pulling it apart and tinkering until it probably doesn’t much resemble the book she started in 1998. Stir up all this in a pot and we’ve got a recipe for making a talented author drop a mediocre book.  Maybe S&S read it, said “it’s a dud, the fandom is 20 years old, let’s just not” and Ms. Smith retired from public life in defeat.  

This makes an unhappy sort of sense, but it doesn’t answer the question of why The Last Lullaby never appeared either.

Anyway. This has been a long post, lots of links and some thoughts on the philosophy of questing.

[naamechange4inte-grity]

one page at a time

CW: anxiety as a theme, panic attacks

Aziraphale Fell is a 51-year-old talented ghostwriter who’s current project is to write the autobiography of one Anthony J. Crowley, a 49-year-old world-renowned herpetologist. At first, Crowley seems to be, quite frankly, an arsehole; when they first meet he’s all flash and snark, and during their first few at-home interviews he acts prickly, distant, and uncooperative. Aziraphale begins to wonder whether or not he can even write the autobiography at all with what little he’s given him when one evening he gets a distressing call from Crowley, asking him to come over immediately.

“Crowley? It’s half-ten, why did you call me here? Are you alright?” Aziraphale asks while stepping inside after Crowley moves back to pace. He’s breathing quickly, though trying to take deep breaths.

“Not really. No. Um. This is really unexpected, I know, I just, I just didn’t have anyone else to call. No family. No friends, really. Just coworkers, and people who probably hate me. I’m going to die alone aren’t I? No one to remember me?” Crowley babbles, his voice hitching with barely restrained cries. Aziraphale winces when he sees Crowley grasp at his own long red hair so tightly it most certainly hurt.

Aziraphale approaches him carefully, the deep worry he’s feeling likely obvious on his face; he feels almost as though he’s approaching a startled deer. “Crowley, what’s this about?”

Crowley turns to him sharply, his eyes wide and crazed behind the sunglasses. “I don’t know!” He sobs, and Aziraphale’s heart splits at the sight of tears running down his cheeks. “I never asked to be so anxious all the time, never asked to-- to break down like this and drive everyone away! And now I’ve done it to you…”

Crowley slumps onto the couch, trembling like a leaf in a hurricane as he buries his face in his hands. Aziraphale comes over and puts a soothing hand on his shoulder which prompts Crowley to look up at him.

“You haven’t driven me away with this. I’m not going to leave you in the middle of a panic attack, and if anyone did that to you in the past they are a horrible, horrible person.” That earns Aziraphale a small smile and a sniffle. “Now, how about we get you a nice cup of tea, and perhaps a blanket if you like. I’ll stay as long as you need me to.”

Crowley looks so frightened, but so hopeful too, and it breaks Aziraphale’s heart anew as he sets off to the kitchen to make tea. Well, now we’re getting somewhere with this autobiography, the nosy voice in Aziraphale says, before he promptly smacks it down for being rude.

After this incident, Crowley opens up more in their interviews. As he does, Aziraphale finds the man underneath the cold, serpentine persona to be delightful-- delightful enough, even, to develop feelings for. Crowley would never reciprocate though, not for some stuffy old fuddy-duddy of a ghostwriter, of course not. Not even when Aziraphale half-catches Crowley staring at him sometimes, or when Crowley always pays for lunch, or when they spend much more time together than expected between a ghostwriter and his client…

[telehxhtrash]

Man I remember in that 1 episode where Netero and Zeno find Meurem and Komugi, and the narration is like "they saw a horrible monster holding the young girl so tenderly" for like a hot second I j had no clue what it was talking about bc Meurem isn't a horrible monster he's pretty

@wordsbymarcy did you ghostwrite this