Taking Ghostwriting to a Whole New Level

rennie | | 1 Comment

After ten years at PEOPLE and the good fortune/fantastic luck of being able to co-author three great books, I am embarking on a new writing journey.

It’s exciting, it’s scary, and it’s a lot like getting naked and walking into my literary agent’s office buck naked and asking, “like what you see?”

I’m taking my first stab at writing … fiction! It’s been quite an eye-opening process and my first real experience with writer’s block. When you’re a journalist or you’re writing someone else’s story in a book, the material is all there in front of you. It’s not overly difficult to force yourself to get to work when A) the story already exists and you just have to tell it and B) you’ve got a deadline to meet.

Perhaps I shouldn’t admit that after a decade of writing professionally, but it only truly occurred to me in the past few months that with fiction, I’m coming up with the story. Like, creating it from nothing in my head. And I’m not going to find it on Twitter or RueLaLa or my favorite nail polish blog. (I’m Essie’s Haute As Hello for the weekend — what color are y’all wearing?)

All of that said, I do have 103 pages written (25,000 words, thankyouverymuch) of this first attempt at fiction. It’s teen horror novel that has actually spooked me a bit as I’m writing it, which I can only interpret as a good sign.

Speaking of signs, I think I got another one last night. After my train of thought had idled in Procrastination Station for far too long, I buckled down and really dove in. While tweaking a particularly spooky scene, I caught some movement out of the corner of my eye.

Click below to see a curtain in my living room, swaying for no apparent reason, just after midnight. No fans or air conditioners are blowing in the background. (That’s Eric Church playing on my iTunes–a good soundtrack for this scary little event, I thought)

haunted

Creepy, right? I’m choosing to take this as another good sign, perhaps that my teen horror story will one day actually be published and then lead to many more books.

Now let’s see if this ghost that appears to be squatting in my apartment has any ideas about my plot development …