Ghosted
Have you ever felt invisible? TWO 50-word stories
Article voiceover
These two pieces were written to a prompt from at
- using the word GHOST.
First Date
They met for the first time today. She rattled on about her family, her work, her favorite films. About her motorcycle adventure, her trip to Jamaica. She was so excited, she totally forgot to say, “Tell me about you.”
She doesn’t stand a ghost of a chance with him.
Anticlimax
The memoir was enormously successful. “A brilliant first work,” they said. “Such dazzling prose!”
She wasn’t as gratified as she’d hoped to be. His name was on the cover, not hers.
She had agreed to the contract, of course. She just hadn’t anticipated how invisible a ghost writer would feel.
Bremer/McCoy
Krystal Klar … slightly out of tune
My wife was kind of a ghost writer in her previous job, as executive assistant to the president of a local university. Someone else was tasked with writing speeches for the president, but Deb looked at them first (because that’s what exec assistants do) and was unimpressed. So she penciled in suggestions. That her boss liked. After that happened a couple times, the president told her to “do her Deb thing” before even looking at a draft. When the nominal speech writer moved on, Deb did all the speeches from scratch; when the president was asked to do a monthly column for the local paper, Deb did those too. When Dr. McNairy (the president) retired, she made sure her successor knew what he was getting in his executive assistant. 😊
Yes, they may have gotten off on the wrong foot. Hope she was just nervous cause she likes him.
Maybe the ghost writer's "invisibility" is equal to the "author's" knowledge that he didn't write the book.