From Ghosting to Vampires
How a ghostwriter rediscovered her voice through grief, vampire lore, and a story 20 years in the making.
Reprinted from Writer’s Digest, June 9, 2023
The alien romance you just downloaded because someone reviewed it as hot, hot, hot? That might’ve been me. The next MI6 Bond, James Bond? Also me. The YA fantasy that readers say they could read again and again? Could be me.
That’s because I’m a ghost. A ghostwriter, specifically.
My dual roles of ghostwriter and author didn’t develop side-by-side or all at once. After my dad and I stomped across several college campuses and I chose Southern Methodist University’s school of journalism, I split the difference between athletic training as my day job and writing contributing articles as a mere side hustle for many years.
My first book was published when I was 42, and I was drilling down on my fifth novel when I stumbled upon ghostwriting and editing. At the time, I was participating in an Austin writers’ guild, and as I understood it then, a ghostwriter was a person who wrote for hire in the name of another. I’d read, for example, about heirs of Louis L’Amour, V. C. Andrews, and Ernest Hemingway publishing those authors’ works posthumously—and while some were unpublished originals, others were ghostwritten in their signature styles.
As I soon discovered, I usually ghostwrite for clients who don’t have time to write, struggle with English as a second language, or simply can’t get their ideas organized. So my day job over the past 10 years became this service to help others—something I quickly realized I was cut out for all along. I especially enjoy working with first-time indie authors as a one-stop shop, helping them write, package, and publish quality books.
I kid you not—while I say I enjoy ghostwriting, it comes with its own unique challenges. Every ghostwriter or editor needs a core group of listeners with whom they share anonymous bytes—readerly wise friends and fellow trenchers—especially for balancing the challenges in this business. Very few clients crave having their work or ideas picked apart. I also have regular Friday lunches with one of my proofreaders to review such formidable woes. The development of healthy critique tactics and strong market knowledge are the life and breath of any ghostwriter. This growth process takes time, experience, and an equivalent number of hard knocks.
If you hang out your shingle and sign on to work, the days go by quickly. After just a few years freelancing with Upwork and the James Innes Group, I’d already checked in on a variety of projects with clients across the globe. From novellas to novel series, and screenplays to the stage, I’d written a metric ton of material. I’d ghosted self-help, how-to, inspirational, spiritual, blog, technical, and academic works, plus résumé and LinkedIn profile enhancements. Genres I’d worked on included YA, children’s, adult fantasy, stories based on or inspired by true events, memoirs, paranormal, sci-fi, and romance—as well as thriller, horror, and action-adventure.
Fast-forward to 2020. By that point, I’d written so much that I had developed a bit of a jaundiced attitude toward storytelling. What made a story worth telling? We’d gone through a pandemic, and I’d lost both parents within two years of each other. I took time off to process and didn’t write for 14 months. I did, however, keep a running list of story ideas and aha moments that came to me while finishing work for everybody else. I posed the question to my intuitive writer friend and listener, Lois DiMari: Which story do you think is worth me writing—as myself? She chose Falling Stars, and I had a good feeling about it too.
I’d studied vampire lore since grade school and had ghosted three books about vampires. These books were far more graphic and dystopian, set during a future world war taking place in bombed-out military zones and reconstituted American territories. The vampires in those stories were more feral in nature, governed by clan hierarchy and the constant struggle to find their next meal under martial law.
For Falling Stars, I wanted to reintroduce the romantic vampire—what some say is the original vampire story in Greek myth: a love affair between a young Italian adventurer, Ambrogio, and a Delphi temple maiden, Selene. I also decided to cast Viscount Claudius Fallon as a sick dhampyre, or vampire-human hybrid. He craves red meat, but his major issue isn’t thirst for blood—it’s surviving his congenital leukemia.
The nine-year-old boy in the story, Tommy Lucas, believes Fallon—an urban legend—is still alive in his hometown. Tommy has his own dilemma: an incurable blood cancer called paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobinuria (PNH). He believes his illness resembles Fallon’s closely enough to confirm he’s a vampire too.
Tommy’s fantasy is not entirely unfounded. Some of the earliest “natural” vampires may have been carriers of porphyria, an inherited disease more common among Eastern European nobility in the Middle Ages. Much like PNH, victims of porphyria were sun-sensitive. They excreted blood in their urine and were often sickened by sulfur-rich spices like garlic. Medieval physicians often recommended that porphyria patients drink animals’ blood to raise their heme levels. In severe cases, facial sunburn caused skin to recede from their gums, exposing their teeth. Tommy is therefore convinced he’s a sick vampire too.
Falling Stars was a story idea hanging on my bucket list for a long time—one I wasn’t sure I’d return to. In the darkest moments of 2020, I wasn’t sure I’d ever pick up a pencil again—for myself or anyone else.
Grieving can be an elaborately strange process, and for me, an even stranger one. One day a switch simply clicked back on, and I started writing again. I’d originally outlined Falling Stars as a screenplay treatment and pitched it at the Maui Writers’ Conference in 2001 to Alison Rosenzweig, one of the producers of Windtalkers. I put it away with the other pitches that weren’t green-lighted at the time and pulled it out again in 2021. I figured 20 years was long enough to sort some things out.*
Now I tell all my clients: if a story idea suits up and shows up, it’s there for a reason. Trust that. Yours is next.
*A serial to this article is coming soon: how I came full circle to crafting Falling Stars as a screenplay in 2024 and signing on with Buffalo 8 as Executive Producer.
