Why I Give a Damn

The honest answer to why this practice exists, why it works the way it works, and why I fight to get other people’s stories finished while there is still time.

This page is not sales copy. It is the real answer to why this practice exists, why it works the way it works, and why I fight for other people’s stories. If you want my professional background and personal history, the About page covers that. This page covers the why.

The Honest Answer

I do this work because I have watched what happens when stories do not get told in time, and I have watched what happens when they do. Those two outcomes are not equivalent. The difference between them is the entire reason this practice exists.

Most ghostwriters will tell you they care about your story. I am not going to claim more care than the next person. What I will tell you is that I have specific reasons for fighting hard to get books finished, specific people who taught me what is at stake, and a specific set of professional disciplines that came from a different career than most ghostwriters had before this one. All of that shows up in how I run a project. The rest of this page is the explanation.

What Claudia Taught Me About Time

My wife Claudia died of lung disease in 2005, after twelve and a half years of marriage and roughly twelve years of chronic illness. She was sharp and funny and unflinchingly herself until the disease finally took the option of being any of those things away from her. The full story of those years is on the About page, and the memoir of the marriage told from her cat’s perspective is Buttercup.

What matters for this page is what living with Claudia and losing her taught me about time. Specifically: time runs out faster than people think it will. The book you keep meaning to write does not write itself while you are busy with other things. The interviews you keep meaning to do with your father do not happen the year after he dies. The memoir you have been talking about for a decade is not a memoir until it is on the page.

When a client tells me “we’ll do this next year,” I hear that sentence differently than I would have heard it before 2005. Sometimes next year arrives. Often it does not arrive in the form anyone planned for. That is not pessimism. It is the actual rate at which the world removes options. The work this practice does is built around that fact.

My Grandfather, and the First Book

I ghostwrote my first book at seventeen. It was unpaid. The client was my grandfather, who had been a prisoner of war in the Pacific theater during World War II, including time on the Bataan Death March and four years of captivity. The interviews ran for hours across many sessions. He had spent decades carrying memories that nobody in his daily life had ever wanted to hear in detail.

Two things happened during that project that have shaped everything since.

The first was technical. I learned what ghostwriting actually is at the craft level: how to listen for the moments that carry the meaning rather than just the moments that carry the facts, how to preserve someone’s voice rather than overwriting it with my own, how to structure decades of memory into something a reader can follow without getting lost. Those are not skills you read about in a book. You acquire them by doing the work with a real person across real material.

The second thing was harder to name. At some point during the interviews, my grandfather realized that someone had finally heard him properly. The recognition arrived on his face. I was seventeen and did not have the vocabulary for what was happening, but I understood it. That moment is the reason I have done this work for the rest of my life. There are people walking around right now carrying material that nobody has asked them to put down properly. Some of them will die without ever having the chance. Some of them will not, if the right person sits down with them.

Bonnie Dillabough

In 2014 I met Bonnie Dillabough through a Facebook group for coloring book creators. We became friends. When I relaunched my Author Talk podcast a couple of years later, she helped edit interviews. Week after week she listened to authors who had pushed through fear and self-doubt to publish their books.

Bonnie had carried a recurring dream since she was sixteen. She had never written it down. By the time I met her she was in her early sixties and still had not written it down. The reason was the reason most people do not write their books: she did not fully believe she could.

After she interviewed Mercedes Lackey on the podcast, Lackey told her plainly: put your butt in the chair and write. I challenged Bonnie to try NaNoWriMo. She wrote 78,000 words that November, finished the manuscript on New Year’s Day, and published The House on Infinity Loop two weeks before her 64th birthday. That book launched what became the nine-book Dimensional Alliance series — a sprawling science fiction and fantasy universe built from the dream she had been carrying for almost half a century.

Bonnie died in April 2025. She had published eight books, with a ninth nearly complete. A tribute page for her lives here.

If she had not started writing at sixty-three, none of those books would exist. The dream would have died with her. Everyone who has read those books would have read different books instead. The universe she built — the one she had been carrying around in her head since she was a teenager — would have stayed inside her head until it was gone with the rest of her.

That is the actual stakes of this work, and it is why I push clients harder than they sometimes want to be pushed. The reason I am willing to be that person is because I have watched the alternative.

My Father

My father was a serious artist. Pen and ink portraits of generals and leaders while he was a civil servant at Norton Air Force Base. Air Force career before that with security clearances and adventures he rarely talked about in detail. He met my mother young and they stayed married for the rest of their lives.

He left civil service to become a full-time artist. Opened a gallery in Blue Jay, California, then moved to Lake Arrowhead and ran an art gallery and gift store in the Lake Arrowhead Village for over twenty-five years. He and my mother built that business together. Then health problems started accumulating. They sold the gallery. The savings ran out faster than anyone expected. They ended up destitute, eventually abandoning their home and moving into a subsidized apartment in Big Bear. My mother died in 2018. My father died of COVID in 2020.

I had to handle what was left. They were level four hoarders. A one-bedroom apartment and two full storage units containing everything they had ever owned, sorted only by the loose categories that hoarding produces. I worked through it with help from Pathways, the organization that does this kind of cleanup. It took months.

Here is what I want to tell you about my father’s life. He was an artist of real talent. He had decades of stories worth telling — the Air Force years, the clearance work, the portraits, the long marriage, the gallery, the people who came through Lake Arrowhead and bought his work, the decisions that built the business and the decisions that broke it, what twenty-five years of running a small art business in a mountain town actually taught him. There was a full life there. A full marriage. A full business.

He is not remembered.

His paintings are still being sold on eBay and other resale sites. I occasionally get an email from someone who has bought one of his paintings and wants to know who the artist was. I tell them what I can. But the actual stories — the texture of his life, the things he learned, the way he saw the people he painted — those died with him. Nobody wrote them down. I did not write them down while he was alive, because we did not have a relationship that would have permitted it, and by the time the question of whether to write them down even occurred to me, the moment was gone.

A book would have changed that. Not all of it. Books do not fix every problem. But the artist who painted those generals would have had a record, and the buyers who find his paintings on eBay would be able to read about the man whose work they now own. That book does not exist because nobody made it exist. That is the cost of not doing the work.

I think about my father every time a client tells me they will get to the book next year. Sometimes they will. Sometimes they will not. The question is not whether the project feels urgent today. The question is what will be lost if the project does not get done.

The People in My Photographs

For eight years after Claudia died, I photographed Southern California’s bellydance community and Renaissance faires across the country. Nearly a million photographs. I became, for a while, the unofficial court photographer of an entire scene. I have written about those years in Adventures of a Belly Dance Photographer, a serialized memoir on Master of Worlds.

What I want to say on this page is what I learned from spending eight years inside two communities full of remarkable people.

The dancers had stories. The Ren faire performers had stories. Some of those stories were triumphs: women like Sabrina Fox who climbed from local open-stage performances to becoming top-tier touring bellydance stars over years of work that nobody outside the community ever saw. Renaissance faire actors who had carried dreams since childhood of playing the Queen at a major faire, who put in decade after decade of unpaid weekend work to eventually get cast, and who lit up onstage in a way that the audience experienced as magic but that the performer had built brick by brick across half a lifetime.

Other stories were hard. Survivors of abuse who had built new identities through dance and found their voices on a stage in front of a few dozen people who understood. Performers who had been told they were not enough by everyone in their lives before they found a community that welcomed them. People who had walked through real darkness and arrived at the other side of it carrying everything they had learned along the way.

Every single one of these people has a book in them. Most of them are known within a fifty-mile radius of where they perform. Outside that radius, they are unknown. The dancer who spent fifteen years building her name in the Los Angeles scene is invisible in Phoenix. The Ren faire actor whose Queen is legendary at Faire X is unknown at Faire Y three states over. The performer whose recovery story would help thousands of other survivors is known only to the people who have seen her dance.

A book changes that. Not all at once and not for everyone. But the difference between being a local legend and being someone whose story can travel is whether the story has been written down. Even a short book is enough. A hundred and twenty pages, well written, properly produced, available on Amazon and in the green rooms of the faires the performer travels to. Suddenly the dancer who was unknown in Phoenix has a copy of her book in a Phoenix bookstore. The Renaissance actor who never traveled beyond California is being read by Ren faire fans in Texas and Michigan. The survivor whose story would help others can actually reach those others.

None of those books exist for most of these people. The reasons are the reasons most books do not get written: time, money, not knowing how to start, not believing the story is worth telling. Each of those reasons is fixable. The third one I can fix directly. The fourth one is what makes the work matter.

When I think about who I want to spend my professional time helping, the answer includes the executives and the founders and the coaches whose books support business outcomes. It also includes the dancer who spent twenty years becoming great at her craft and who deserves to have her name known beyond the people who already know it. The mechanism is the same. The stakes are different in scale but not in kind.

Mick Foley and the Yellow Legal Pads

Mick Foley is one of my favorite writers, which is a sentence that requires explanation, because Mick Foley is best known for being a professional wrestler.

He wrestled under the names Cactus Jack, Mankind, and Dude Love across more than twenty-five years in the ring. He took the kind of physical punishment most people cannot watch on video. He was thrown off the top of a sixteen-foot cage through a Spanish announcer’s table. He lost most of an ear in a Germany match in 1994. He was a four-time world champion and an inaugural WWE Hall of Fame inductee. By the late 1990s he was one of the biggest stars in professional wrestling, full stop.

In 1999 he published a memoir called Have a Nice Day! A Tale of Blood and Sweatsocks. The book went to number one on the New York Times bestseller list. It is over seven hundred pages long. It is funny, specific, intelligent, and self-aware in ways that almost no celebrity memoir is, and it sounds nothing like anything else on the shelf.

Foley wrote it himself. By hand. On yellow legal pads.

No ghostwriter. No collaborator with a “with” credit on the cover. No tape recorder and transcription service. He sat down in airports and hotel rooms across a wrestling schedule that would have flattened most healthy people and he filled legal pad after legal pad in his own handwriting. When he was done he had written one of the best sports memoirs of the era.

I am a ghostwriter. I think Mick Foley is what a serious writer looks like, and his book is one of the strongest arguments I know for why writing matters and why the act of doing it cannot be entirely outsourced.

Most of my clients are not going to do what Foley did. They have day jobs that require their full attention, family obligations they cannot set aside, careers that depend on continuing to do other work at a high level. The kind of immersion Foley brought to those legal pads is not realistic for most people, and that is the reason ghostwriters and book coaches exist. The job is to make the book possible for people who would not be able to write a serious book on their own.

But the respect for the work is the same whether the writer does it themselves or whether they bring in help. The clients I work best with are the Mick Foleys of their fields — people who would respect the work enough to do it themselves if they had the time, and who hire me because they do not have the time, not because they think the book is something less than serious. The clients I would not take on are the ones who think the book is a checkbox.

If you ever wonder whether the difference between a book that gets read and a book that does not is craft, pick up Have a Nice Day. The man wrote it longhand on legal pads and it is better than ninety percent of the executive memoirs published with full publisher backing. That is what taking the work seriously looks like. That is the standard.

The Tech Background and Why It Helps

Before writing became the work, I spent thirty-three years in enterprise IT. Twenty of those as Director of Computer Operations at Trader Joe’s, running the systems that kept a national retail operation functioning. Before that, VP of operations at two technology firms. Earlier, SCADA work for water utilities including Las Vegas Valley, Ojai, and New Haven.

That career is not the reason I do this work, but it shapes how I do it. Three things specifically.

The first is a debugging instinct. In enterprise IT you learn to find the real problem hiding behind the obvious symptoms. The CEO who tells me their book should be about leadership strategy almost always has a more interesting book hiding underneath. Usually it is about a specific failure, a specific turning point, or a specific decision that taught them what they actually know. Finding that real book is the same skill as finding the root cause of a system failure. You ask the questions that surface what the surface is hiding.

The second is high-stakes listening. In enterprise IT at the executive level, you cannot afford to mishear what an engineer is telling you about a system failure. If you misunderstand the actual issue, you can take down payroll or lose a data center. That trains a particular kind of listening that transfers directly to client interviews. When a client says “I’m not sure how to say this,” the answer is rarely to suggest clever phrasing. The answer is to keep asking better questions until what they actually want to say comes through.

The third is deadline discipline. Books and enterprise IT both run on deadlines. The consequences differ. The carryover is the same: I know how to keep a complex project moving without dropping pieces of it along the way. Books do not finish themselves while everyone is busy with other things. Someone has to keep the project moving. That part of the work is mine.

Clients Whose Stories Almost Did Not Get Told

The case studies page lists the full set of projects with outcomes. A few are worth naming here because they specifically illustrate what this page is arguing.

Each of these books almost did not happen. Each of them happened because someone was willing to sit down with the person, do the actual work, and finish the project in the window of time that was available.

The Code of Ethics

A few years ago I wrote a Code of Ethics for Ghostwriters and published it on this site. The full code is on that page. The reason I wrote it is what belongs on this page.

Most ghostwriting is handled informally with vague contracts, unclear confidentiality terms, and no published professional standards. Clients are often surprised after the project starts to discover what they did not negotiate at the beginning. I find that arrangement unprofessional and easy to fix. I wrote the standards I operate under publicly so that any client who is considering hiring me can read exactly what I will and will not do, how I handle confidentiality, who owns the work, how AI is used or disclosed, and what happens to recordings and notes after the project ends. None of that should be invisible to the client when they sign the contract.

Publishing the Code was an attempt to set a higher standard for the industry by demonstrating it rather than describing it. It is also a way of being clear with prospective clients about what they would be hiring before they hire it.

What Clients Have Said

The Closing Argument

I fight for the books because I have seen what happens when the fight gets lost. My grandfather almost died with his stories still inside him. Bonnie almost died with her dream still unwritten. Claudia did die, and the memoir I eventually wrote about those years is the only version of her that exists now in any form she chose. My father died with everything he knew still inside him, and no book exists to tell the people who buy his paintings who he was. Dozens of the dancers and Ren faire performers I photographed for eight years carry stories that would help other people if those stories were written down, and most of them never will be. None of those outcomes were inevitable. Each of them depended on someone sitting down and doing the work in the window of time that was available — or on no one doing it.

The clients I work with now are in similar windows, even when the windows do not feel urgent yet. The founder who has been meaning to write the book is still meaning to write the book three years later, and the moment when the book would have done the most work has come and gone. The executive whose career would have moved differently with a book in hand never quite gets to the project because the days are full and the project requires sustained attention they do not have to give. The parent who has been thinking about a family memoir is six months further from being able to do the interviews than they were last year, and the trajectory does not reverse.

My job is to be the person who shows up, takes the project seriously, and finishes it in the time available. That is what this practice is for. That is why I give a damn.

The Next Step

If something on this page makes you want to talk about a project, the next step is a discovery call. Thirty minutes. No pitch. No pressure. We figure out whether the practice is the right fit for your book and what the realistic timeline and scope would look like. If we are not a match, you will leave with a clearer sense of what kind of help your project actually needs.

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