January 31, 2022

Golden morning, the trees around the apartments fluttering with bluebirds. 

My friend H– possibly a former student; one loses track–writes on Facebook: In my own experience, when I was working as a ghostwriter and doing copy, the people who did become successful (like mainstream, household name successful) had terrible writing. I mean, appalling, if you grew up reading classic literature and being taught to write by old school "school marms" - but you couldn't clean it up too much, because it had to have this particular style that was indicative of what mainstream publishing wanted. To me, that was questionably bad writing, but it was accessible to the Joe Blow and Karen Book Club Next Door Reader. At least people were reading. The "writers" who'd get the biggest book deals were celebrities and politicians not writing their own material. I was a nameless, faceless person, hidden behind a NDA, writing people's books for them. The writers who were extremely talented and had outstanding, raw original material were having to publish online and hopefully build their own readership enough to eventually gain notice of a university press. If they were lucky. Those years were ethically tough for me. It was painful to see books I wrote, or partially wrote, in print. Where I only made a few hundred bucks at the time and was dealing with housing and food instability, Joe Deep Pockets was being called an "author" and lauded for his work. I haven't written anything in probably 6 or 7 years. I fucking hate the publishing industry with a passion now.

She can have no inkling of what this testimony means to me. It is horrible, of course, but it means that I am not alone. I am not singled out. It is what I needed to hear in order to go on.