Before 2014 I Spent a Thousand Hours a Year Watching Other People’s Work
They say they are too busy to exercise, too tired to cook, too overwhelmed to read, and too stressed to see friends. Then they watch Netflix for four hours.
Tag: Writing Tips
The craft decisions that change the work rather than decorate it. When to break a rule, why resolutions collapse in February, what editing is really for, and what a long writing life looks like from inside it.
AIAI Is a Writing Assistant, Not a Writer: How to Use It Right
AI is not a writer. It is a digital assistant you direct, skilled at some tasks and weak at others. Here is how a working ghostwriter uses it, where it earns its place, and the reservations that keep it on…
Disaster RecoveryI Climbed Out of That Canyon at Eight at Night
Breathless at the top of a canyon at eight at night, explaining to a fireman named Kurt what had happened and where my father was.
FearI Spent Thirty-Three Years in a Box and Called It a Career
Never went looking for better, never went back to school, never reached past the edge of what I had. Comfortable is the wall people mistake for a career.
AI AdoptionWhy Sentient AI Will Probably Be One Mind
Every film about artificial intelligence imagines a robot waking up as a person in a box. The architecture points somewhere stranger: one awareness spread across millions of copies, with no single location and no fixed size.
AI AdoptionYou’re Renting, Not Owning: What the Anthropic Shutdown Teaches Writers
The U.S. government switched off Anthropic's most powerful AI models overnight, proving in a single stroke that nobody who uses AI actually owns it. If your business runs on a rented tool, whoever controls it can change the deal or…
CareersI Decided in Thirty Seconds Whether Your Resume Was Worth Reading
Twenty years on the hiring side of the table. I know what hiring managers are thinking because I was one, and the first thirty seconds decides more than anybody admits.
CareersI Asked for a Weekend Off. My Boss Said Fifteen Minutes or You Are Fired.
Not asking permission, just telling him I would be out of range for a weekend. He said if I did not call back within fifteen minutes of a page, I was fired.
Personal GrowthIt Took a Camera to Make Me Comfortable Around Women
I went looking for a method and found several. None of them made me comfortable in a room with a woman in it. A camera did that, years later, entirely by accident.
AI vs Human GhostwritingWhat I Actually Tell Clients About AI
Six real questions clients ask me about AI, and exactly how I answer each, not hot takes, but the answers I have refined across hundreds of conversations with people about to spend a year and real money on a book.…
GhostwritingHow Can You Write My Book If You Don’t Know My Field?
How can you write my book if you don't know my field? Because writing a book and knowing a subject are two different jobs, and almost nobody is good at both. You bring the expertise through interviews; I bring the…
DefamationThe Revenge Memoir: Who Shouldn’t Write One
A revenge memoir is a bad idea for the writer and a worse one for the ghostwriter. I once turned down a former mob informant who wanted to name names and settle scores, then promised to keep my role secret,…