Broadening horizons

(Image by Lenka Novotná from Pixabay)

I’ve been umming and ahhing for well over a year about turning my hand to ghostwriting. Of course, much of my B2B and SEO work is ghostwriting. I don’t get to add my name to it and I have no future claim over it. (I keep copyright on work done in my own time with my own name and at my own expense.)

However, for a few years I’ve been editing other people’s books, fiction and non-fiction, and one of my biggest clients is, I suppose, the equivalent of what used to be a pulp fiction publisher. All of his novels are ghostwritten, they’re all historical, one way or another, and I often think: I could do this.

Since about Christmas, I’ve been approached on a monthly basis from various other similar publishers, asking if I’d like to ghostwrite for them, and I’ve always turned them down. But over the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking I wouldn’t actually mind giving it a go. If nothing else, it will (I hope) exercise the old writing muscle.

And so, rather than accept the offer from one of these unknowns, I thought I’d ask my existing client if I could have a go at one for him. He pays slightly more than the others anyway, but with us already having a good, solid working relationship, I wanted to see if I could do it.

We’ve been discussing it for a day or so and the upshot is he’s going to give me a crack at a shorter project.

Obviously, this is going to be confidential and I’ll no doubt be signing an NDA (non-disclosure agreement), so I won’t be able to go into detail. But I’m absolutely thrilled.

The work has been slow throughout September while I’ve shifted my attention away from editing and proofreading jobs and towards writing gigs, but I wish I’d put money on the work coming in once I’d agreed to do a big job for someone.

Sure enough, my lovely client in Hong Kong this very morning sent me the material to edit for the next magazine, and my lovely client in Greece has already said there’s a job on the way for next week. Just watch the Australian job I pitched for this week come through as well now!

I was supposed to be taking today and tomorrow off with the poet, but I might do the job that came in this morning instead. The poet has plenty to do around the house anyway, and he’s dithering over whether to go fishing tomorrow or at the weekend, depending on the weather. If we go tomorrow, I may take some work with me, and if we go at the weekend, I may just take the Kindle with me.

We’ve not had a great deal of proper time off since we moved here as we’ve been busy moving, sorting, cleaning, etc. It will be nice to have some chill time. Plus, with tighter lockdown measures possibly on their way back, this might be the last chance we get for a few weeks to have some “outside”.

Today, then, I’ll try and clear the Hong Kong job and I’ll do the diary for next week as well as the 10-project planner. As soon as the ghostwriting job comes in, I’ll add that to the planner too.