Sometimes you have to think back to the reason your doing something to get that fires stoked up a little. I want to help you do that by asking you to comment what it was that solidified your resolve to become a writer so much that you started and finished your first project. I'll start. I kind of fell in love with the idea of becoming a writer when I took writing 101 in college and got an A- on my term paper. That was quite an accomplishment for someone who got downgraded from Proper English to Reading English in Senior High School. I dabbled in starting a story or two for years after that but I think what really got me started on my first book was reading a book that was interesting but had some issues. I remember distinctly thinking. I could write a book as good as this. Not long after that I wrote my first book because I was hopeful of making some extra money when it published. Well that was being overly optimistic and several rejection letters later I laid it down for several years until a friend told me I should try self publishing on Amazon. Let me shorten this by saying I am still hopeful of getting a real agent or publisher to accept it and am working on getting it in better shape for that day. What's your genesis story?

In this one I discuss writing with consideration for your audience.

Please consider joining me for a free live session some time so I can critique/edit and highlight your work on a shared screen for the community. It would be a nice change for our other members. Please be aware I can only do one at a time so you might have to do rock, paper, scissors to see who's gets the show. Today I talked about how writing is a puzzle that the writer is putting together and we as the author need to make sure we are not jamming pieces in where they don't belong so that in the end we have a wonderful picture for the reader to see. I hope you enjoy it.

Another "Watch Me Write" editing session. The biggest take away is: how to find the word you are looking for that ends up being a dive into finding that the spell check just did not know the word I was trying to use. So I ended up leaving the sqigly (misspelled on purpose as a visual) line.

I guess I never paid enough attention to the title "Ghost Writer", until now. I always assumed that they were people paid by the big hitters to help them write parts of their books, but having talked to a Ghost Writer recently, I now know they work to bring to life an idea that an untrained client wants to flesh out and get the credit for. I hope I am getting that right. When everything is considered, in my mind the ghost writer plays the same part as AI by taking someone's story idea and writing it for them. And, if that is considered OK, why are people so worried about whether or not something was written by AI. I think soon they won't care at all. I can understand the ghost writer's viewpoint, because that is how they earn their money but so do people who edit for a living. They both could be replaced by AI just as quickly as Hollywood Video was replaced by Redbox, cable, and Prime video. I look at it this way: We have become a pleasure seeking people. We get it quick and poorly made, then throw it away when it becomes useless or replicable. Yet, there is a certain value placed on something that has been handmade. Handmade is greater than a reproduction or cheaply mass-produced commodity. The things that have greater value take time to acquire the skills to make. They seem to last longer and maybe that is because people take greater care of them and only use them when it is special to do so. Maybe we've been getting things backwards. Ghost Writers, why aren't you the artist paying people for their ideas or coming up with your own then making your money (and fame) from being the published writer? Are you at least working on your own potential best seller? You should be, because it seems to me that you will soon be replaced by AI and it might be just as quickly as when Hollywood Video went out of business. Just something to think about. Maybe you should be focusing on writing and editing your own masterpieces and getting them published. I'm not trying to belittle or get on Ghost Writers as if they are bad. Nor am I trying to degrade them. They are more comparable to an employee of a newspaper or a freelance writer who is paid by a magazine, in my eyes. I am only trying to give them a heads up.