Uncategorized | Adam Reger | Freelance Writer

February 15, 2012

A bold reimagining of ghostwriting

Two of the more fun freelance writing projects I’ve done have been ghostwriting gigs. One was a novel and one was a children’s book, and in both cases I really enjoyed talking to the author, figuring out what he/she wanted, and then sitting down and delivering the product.

Periodically, I’ll seek out more ghostwriting work by looking around Craig’s List, sometimes advertising my services there, or doing a search for “ghostwriter” on Indeed.com, a job-listing aggregator that has saved me time before. The stuff you find in these places is, however, not often worth finding. At least on Indeed, a lot of it comes by way of elance and oDesk, marketplaces where writers (and others offering services) bid on the jobs posted. Finding an appealing job listed there is always an exercise in deflation, because the person offering the job, either from an understanding of how the marketplace works or from simple cheapness, doesn’t offer much money; the situation is worsened by the bidders, who undercut one another and drive the price down. I suppose it’s classic economics, but it’s always a tough thing to see. Invariably I end up thinking about how many books I could read in the time it would take me to write someone’s non-fiction book and be paid $300 for my trouble.

This is all background to introduce an ad I stumbled upon today, one that truly stood out from the crowd. While the job-poster gets points for forthrightness, surveying what I know about ghostwriting I must say that this is a new one on me:

“I want to buy your completed manuscript/novel” reads the headline; “You will sign over the publishing rights and will not be credited in the book. Essentially, you will become a ghostwriter for it. Once a relationship is established this could lead to more work with much higher pay.”

Yikes. I guess that constitutes a ghostwriting relationship. Except for the part where I wrote this novel for myself, to hopefully publish under my own name. You know, as part of my hopes and dreams. But I guess I could sell it to you and have you publish it under your or someone else’s name . . . I mean, that would at least spare me the hassle of wrangling with publishers and agents, right? Really, what’s the harm—and I’m sure it’s a decent wage, right? . . . The average bid is how much? $1,527? (as of publication time)

To be honest, I was intrigued by this proposal because I thought of the first two novels I wrote. Neither one has seen the light of day; neither friend nor literary agent has seen these bad boys. I’m not proud enough to send them out into the world under my own name. Why not unload them on this guy?

Because he/she wants the first three chapters for consideration, but “. . . be prepared to send over the entire MS on short notice if you make it to the next round.” Also, he ends the post with “Good luck!” So now it’s a contest? Where the prize is peanuts to take my novel and publish it under your own name?

The crazy thing is, I’m still not at all sure I won’t be doing this. If you opt to do it, fellow writers, good luck!

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February 10, 2012

New Fiction, Newish Book Review 2: On the Move

[Trivia question: What “classic” 80s movie had a sequel featuring the subtitle used in the title to this post? Answer at the end of the post. Hint, courtesy of the band Ween: “_________ was filmed at Woolworth’s / Boyz II Men still keeping up the beat.”]

I have a short story up at the Fourth River, a great literary magazine out of Chatham University that is now venturing into online territory. I’m very pleased to be part of that initial push, and to be published alongside Tina May Hall and Geeta Kothari. My story, “Woman in the Woods,” was written before I started graduate school and I worked on it most of the time that I was in grad school and a little beyond that, too. I submitted it for a (truly great and useful) exercise in Chuck Kinder’s fiction workshop wherein everyone submits a “crap story” at the outset of the class. No one is too put out to hear that their crap story is crap, and everyone’s defenses are lowered that much for the beginning of real workshopping. At the same time, the sometimes radical suggestions your classmates made for repairing the crap story were often brilliant, and of course you were desperate and detached enough to give them a try. At the end of the course you submitted a revision of the crap story; for me, at least, that draft was markedly improved.

“Woman in the Woods” is about the actor Bruce Campbell on the set of The Evil Dead, the classic 1981 horror film that launched the career of Campbell and of Sam Raimi, the director, Campbell’s childhood friend. Some particulars of the film’s plot are changed, and if you read the story you’ll see that it’s obviously fictional. But I tried to stay true to the sense of Campbell that I got from reading his autobiography If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B Movie Actor. In particular, there is one passage that inspired the story: during the filming of Evil Dead, staying in a remote cabin in Tennessee, Campbell got a telephone call from his father in the middle of the night, asking if he (Bruce) had seen his mother. It was the first realization Campbell had that his parents were splitting up. The book was otherwise such a good-natured schtick-fest, and Campbell on the page was so jokey and upbeat, that coming across that passage felt like a weird, lucid view through the cracks into something Campbell was keeping hidden, or that he’d forgotten as it receded further into his past. The choice to cash in favors and take out loans to shoot this low-budget horror film (and one, moreover, that was decidedly unorthodox in 1981, including elements of humor) represented a huge risk, and I could never quite buy Campbell’s depiction of the movie shoot as a long, relaxed hang-out session, albeit one that featured 16-hour days of getting fake blood dumped on him. I suppose I’m projecting now, and was projecting when I first wrote the story, but I guess “Woman in the Woods” is an interpretation of what my own internal state would have been had I been in the middle of nowhere, betting my future (at least to some extent) on this movie. I would have been, in a word, stressed.

Anyway, enough about that. I also have another book review up at Hot Metal Bridge. It’s of Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station. I’m proud of the review because it’s the first one I’ve done for a book that I felt less than enthusiastic about, and I think I remained pretty fair-minded in writing about this novel. Leaving the Atocha Station is a decent book, and Ben Lerner is quite a writer. But he’s not a natural novelist, and it shows. However, the mix of textual and extratextual stuff going on with this book, which I at least skim in the review, is pretty interesting: Lerner is best known as a poet, and so a lot of the preoccupations of the novel are with writing poetry, its potential, ways to interpret it, what it gains and loses from appearing within the context of prose.

[Trivia answer here. If you’d like to hear the song lyric I alluded to above, and/or if you love Ween—and you really should—see here.]

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February 1, 2012

New fiction, newish book review

Some new publications to add to the lists: I have a story, “Santo vs. Crushing Grief,” up at the Northville Review. It’s an “alphabet piece”; note the letter that begins the first word of the first sentence, of the second sentence, and so on, and you’ll see what I mean. Also, the story’s about Santo, of Mexican wrestling fame. Santo was a wrestler—a luchador, with one of those great silky masks that laces up in the back—who made the transition into starring in movies (just look at this amazing filmography!) in which he fought against werewolves, vampires, etc., as well as more prosaic villains like the Blue Demon (also a part of my story). I wrote it during my undergraduate studies and have always been really pleased with it, and I’m especially pleased the Northville Review, which I like a lot, took it.

Second, I wrote a review for Hot Metal Bridge of The Tiger’s Wife by Tea Obreht. That staggeringly, jealous-makingly great debut novel has been out for a while now, so you’re probably aware of it. But if you’d like to read my take, there it is. (I read The Tiger’s Wife while traveling in Germany and Italy this summer, and though the novel’s action is set a bit east of both places, it felt like a fortuitous turn of events; now, when I think of the novel, I think of a long bus ride from Rome to Florence as much as I do the novel’s striking images of a bombed city with exotic zoo animals running free among the wreckage.)

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August 30, 2011

What a Game of Eschaton Looks Like

I’ve remained on the fence way too long re: The Decemberists, the rock band that I should, on paper, like a lot more than I do. (They wrote a song about Myla Goldberg, author of Bee Season; they brought in Gillian Welch to sing on their most recent album; and they are generally pretty literary and wordy without being too unbearably pretentious about it (at least most of the time).)

This new video, for “Calamity Song,” has got to put them over the top with me. Directed by Michael Schur, who works on the fantastic Parks and Recreation, “Calamity Song” depicts a game of Eschaton from the David Foster Wallace novel Infinite Jest (which I’ve written about here). The New York Times wrote a piece giving the full background.

Eschaton is a game that the students in Infinite Jest‘s fictional Enfield Tennis Academy play on an expanse of multiple tennis courts, nets removed. It’s a game of apocalyptic global warfare, with students forming blocs like REDCHIN (Red China) and SOUTHAF (South Africa). They take turns lobbing tennis balls, representing so many megatons of explosives, across the court to hit targets in other nations. The accumulating damages, measured in military destruction and civilian casualties, are tallied by a student who works a computer on wheels, continuously calculating the effects of, say, a direct hit on a major metropolitan center in the middle of ONAN (Organization of North American Nations).

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August 25, 2011

Tom Scharpling on Doing the Work

This interview appeared some time ago, but I’ve been thinking about one of its main points over the last few weeks, and thought I’d share. The AV Club interviewed Tom Scharpling, host of the Best Show on WFMU. The whole thing is great and worth your time—even, I’d say, if you don’t know who Scharpling is.

But Tom was asked about the recurrent Best Show theme of “doing it”; i.e., putting in the work, paying dues, etc. To which he replied:

“You get so many people who talk about what they are going to do. I think they get the same kind of emotional, almost chemical, satisfaction out of when they say, ‘I’m gonna write this thing, and it’s gonna be like this, and this is gonna happen, then that’s gonna happen.’ They talk you through it, and they’re getting the same satisfaction from your reaction as if they actually did the thing. And that drives me up the wall. Then they never do it, because they’ve satisfied themselves by talking about doing it. I’ve known a bunch of people like that in life who start a thing, and they’ll talk all day long about the thing they’re gonna do, and how great it’s gonna be. But they’re not doing the thing.”

So good. So well put. Recently I’ve been reading books on investing in the stock market, and a similar point has come up: that investing ruins many investors because they don’t have the constitution for making an investment and sitting on it for years and years; once they’ve gone through the hunt of identifying a promising stock, putting in the research, and making the purchase, the entire chemical thrill of investing is over. When the stock’s price begins to slip, there’s no more satisfaction to be had in staying the course. So they sell, because selling gives them a portion of their money back, and they can go on to hunt down the next stock, and generate the next chemical thrill.

That connection’s a bit far afield, but I know what Tom is saying directly. I do this myself, launching new writing projects, thinking about how good they’re going to be, how well received they’ll be once they’re published, etc. Then I never go back to them.

More to the point, I’ve experienced this lately when working on something with another person. Too often, those talk sessions where you imagine the various jokes you can do, where you look down the road at subsequent ideas or projects you might explore together, prove totally sufficient for the other person’s creative desires.

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April 8, 2011

New story at Twelve Stories

Twelve Stories, an online journal I’ve always liked a whole lot—isn’t twelve an ideal number of stories for an issue?—is up with its brand-new third issue. I’d say that the journal continues to get better, but my modesty prohibits that.

Which is to say that my story, “Elegy for Lost Ambitions,” is one of the lucky twelve. Be sure to check out the whole issue. I’m getting to the last of the other stories now, but everything I’ve read so far has been terrific. Also, as someone who knows next to nothing about typefaces, layout, et cetera, I’ve always found Twelve Stories whole aesthetic wonderfully clean and easy to read. So, you know, one more reason to check it out.

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January 24, 2011

More novel writing stuff

As mentioned previously, Cathy Day had some interesting and useful thoughts on novel writing versus short story writing in an essay at The Millions. Over at her blog, Cathy posts an “outtake” from that essay that concerns making the jump from writing stories to writing a novel. I don’t have anything considered to say about it, other than 1) to be excited to see someone linking to Nidus, the University of Pittsburgh’s defunct-and-all-but-forgotten online literary magazine (for which I was once a lowly fiction reader, and which is a kind of predecessor to Hot Metal Bridge); and 2) to be slightly amused at all the metaphors building up around the process of writing a novel: to the marathon running one, Cathy adds Dan Chaon’s architecture/dark field simile, plus E. L. Doctorow’s night driving comparison. I feel like a person can get lost within the walls of all these competing metaphors. Not that you’d ever lose sight of the fact, but as someone thinking a lot about the process of writing a novel, it’s good to remember that what writing a novel is like, exactly, is crafting a well-paced, dramatically satisfying long-form story that includes fully fleshed-out characters who change over the novel’s course, theme, conflict, and emotional resonance, all rendered in aesthetically pleasing prose.

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January 6, 2011

New Layout

Happy new year to all. The new layout is not too terribly new, but it is exciting, at least for me: I know just enough about blogging to have gotten thoroughly confused, numerous times, trying to change the layout of this blog. But finally I’ve done it, and I have what I wanted: the main page of this site is now a simple note about me, and the blog is not front-row center anymore. I want to keep going with the blog—my recent, dramatic fall-off to the contrary—but I was getting increasingly uneasy with the disconnect between what was going up there and the reason that I originally started this site.

In a nutshell, I hoped this site would serve as an online portfolio to which I could direct potential clients, and where people looking for a freelance writer in Pittsburgh might eventually find themselves. It is that, of course, but it’s also often a blog where I re-cap the latest Philadelphia Eagles game, or discuss how bad M. Night Shymalan’s last movie was. Maybe “unprofessional” doesn’t fairly describe it, but I wouldn’t call it “professional” exactly, either. Basically, any time I’ve provided the link in a freelancing context, I’ve hoped that the person visiting my page would look only at the “Non-fiction” or “Ghostwriting” pages and leave the blog alone. It got to the point where I thought that if I wanted to keep this site going, I might just have to scrub the existing blog archives and restrict my subsequent blogging to 10 ways to maximize SEO efficiency, the art and science of proper comma usage, the challenges of crafting a good white paper for a client, and a bunch of other topics I know I’d find really tedious to read on a blog. (Actually, maybe not the comma thing, if I’m being honest. There are days I might read that.)

Tucking the blog away here will hopefully allow me to keep a balance between being professional but also having fun writing about the things I’ve so far written about. My “problem” (let’s call it a “first-world problem” of the highest order), after all, stemmed from having too much fun with the blog, writing about marathon training, the maintenance guy who hosts telephone conferences from the toilet, and the comedy I enjoy, rather than producing fussy considerations of the ins and outs of being a writer. Being a writer, to me, means engaging with the world.

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December 20, 2010

“Miracle” at the New Meadowlands

They are calling the Philadelphia Eagles’ 38-31 win over the New York Giants the game of the season. Others are calling it “a ‘where were you?’ game.”

I can answer that question easily. I was at home, not watching the game; by that point, I’d given up on the Eagles and decided to save myself the agitation of watching them play out the string while surrounded by annoying Steelers fans streaming into the sports bar where I was watching. (By way of background, I’d been getting more and more irritable throughout the game, beginning when the bar I was at, Silky’s in Squirrel Hill, decided to play the Saints-Ravens game with sound on, despite the dozen or so visible Eagles fans in the bar. I asked if the sound for the Eagles could be turned on, but was told it wasn’t possible. It’s not a big deal, except that Silky’s has done a brisk trade among Eagles fans all the time I’ve lived in Pittsburgh, and you’d think they would occasionally throw these patrons a bone, at least in this circumstance. The Steelers were not on until 4:15—none would dare ask that a Steelers game take second fiddle—and there were no fans in evidence watching the New Orleans-Baltimore game (presumably to “scout” the Ravens, or just to root against them). This resulted in the mildly absurd phenomenon of Ray Rice running up the middle for two yards on first down, with Dan Dierdorf calling it, and a bunch of cheers ringing out throughout the bar as something important happened in the silent Eagles game. I’m venting too much here, I realize, but it’s literally true that my first year in Pittsburgh, you could often hear “Fly, Eagles, Fly” after an Eagles touchdown. This is free extra money every Sunday for Silky’s, but their management seems not to realize it or not to care. If I owned a bar that was inexplicably patronized by a dozen loyal Broncos fans every Sunday, I think I might go with it.)

In any event, the Eagles’ first offensive success came with 3:56 left in the third quarter. Not “too little, too late” by any stretch, but the next couple possessions would determine whether the Eagles would come back or fall short. The Eagles held serve for a few possessions, and then, on a promising 30-yard pass play, DeSean Jackson fumbled. Replays of the fumble showed Jackson being touched by a Giants defender, falling to the ground, and the ball popping out, in that order. A slam-dunk reversal, especially for Andy Reid, a man who’s never been afraid to throw the red flag out on the field.

Except in this case; the cameras caught Reid standing with the flag beside the referee, holding it, holding it . . . surely about to throw it, right? The cameras moved back to the field, where Eli Manning was about to take the snap. Certainly Reid wouldn’t let them get the play off; a referee would run onto the field, waving his arms, blowing his whistle (silently, for those of us in the bar) and announcing (silently, again) that Philadelphia was challenging the ruling on the field that the play resulted in a fumble.

But no. Manning took the snap and handed off to Brandon Jacobs. Every Eagles fan in Silky’s—more of them than I had realized—groaned and yelled and cursed. I’d already settled my bar tab, already had my coat on against the draft. I couldn’t believe what a gutless and/or ignorant call Reid had made, so I left.

I’ve been kicking myself, of course, watching the highlights—especially the footage of DeSean Jackson winning the game, a moment that made me (and lots of others) think of this similar winning moment, courtesy of the great Brian Westbrook—and wishing I’d been a true fan and stayed ’til the bitter end. I’m quite sure, though, that if I were still in the bar several plays later, when Eli Manning threw to tight end Kevin Boss for a touchdown to make the score 31-10 with about eight minutes left to play, I would certainly have walked out then.

(Postscript: the similarities to the Westbrook game-winner are particularly eerie for me because I can remember suffering through that game—the Giants led 10-7 for the longest time, and the Eagles couldn’t do anything offensively—and finally deciding to pack it in. My Dad and I had to be at an aunt’s house for some kind of holiday event, and we figured we’d better get on the road. So we were driving, listening to the radio broadcast of the game, and caught Merrill Reese’s great call of Westbrook breaking free along the sideline to score. In that instance, at least, I can remember where I was when the play happened. For most of the scores on Sunday, I was sitting at my computer, clicking “Refresh” on Sports Illustrated’s play-by-play update, and have no idea exactly when any of these last big plays went off.)

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November 5, 2010

Marathon Homestretch

Over the weekend, I put in my longest training run: 20 miles. It was a good, good feeling to hit the showers after that one, knowing I’d reached the pinnacle and my running would now begin slacking off in preparation for race day, November 21. After the rough, dehydrating experience of running 18 miles the previous Sunday, I was smart enough to bring two little bottles of water with me, plus a packet of GU Energy Gel. It made all the difference in the world. As much as I’d like to think I’m tough enough to go without, the difference between absorbing no calories during a long run and taking in 90 calories is substantial. (An aside re: GU: the gel, while restorative during runs, is kind of gross. Decidedly awesome, on the other hand, are GU Chomps, which taste and go down the gullet like the fruit snacks I so loved as a boy.) And the difference between being totally dried out after a run and being pretty dried out, but not completely, is maybe even more notable. My legs were sore, and I was obliged to take a nap, but I did not feel as drained and just overall zonked out, the way I often do after these long runs. I’d thought those feelings were just inherent to running 14+ miles in one go, but apparently I could have avoided some of these lost Sunday afternoons had I but planned a bit better.

All that is sort of a prelude to say that I faked myself out somewhat and the real pinnacle of my training came last night. Thursday-night runs have slowly been ramping up throughout training, from 5 to 6, etc., and jumping up to 10 last week. I think I knew this already, but last night’s run was also a 10-miler. It sounds like a piece of cake, if one has recently conquered a 20-miler.

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