Columns published in the Anglican Taonga magazine, New Zealand
Mike Crowl goes on a wild ghost chase and nets a foolproof way to choose the perfect name for your baby!
| Ghost writers used to be invisible. Consider the Holy Ghost Writers who
'took dictation' from God for the biblical canon. Most were swept into the
ranks of Anon, or worse, had their books named after someone else.
Recently I surfed the Net to see if being a Christian ghost writer was a common trade, and found one called Charlene Davis. Charlene (who, to keep the record straight, is a Christian writer rather than a Christian ghost) also runs a site at Busy Moms Recipes. You may want to check out its interactive CD containing 42,000 family recipes; its downloadable e-book: Make Your Own Gift Baskets!; and its generous five-days-a-week Tips For Busy Moms! All accompanied by exclamation marks!! One of Charlene's ghost-writing ventures is: The Ultimate Baby Naming eBook - its 'proper' author is Jesse Horowitz. The book, we're told, contains the 21 Biggest Mistakes To Avoid in Naming Your Baby! ("How to make absolutely certain that you've considered all possible religious interpretations of any name before deciding on it…") And a foolproof, new way to choose the perfect name for your baby!! Charlene is also an editor. I'm sure she's pleased that editors, like most ghost writers, are invisible. One of her recent jobs was: Confessions of a Womanizer! by Stephen E. Chatman. (Note her influence in the exclamation mark!!) If you click through to the link from her site you'll find Stephen E. Chatman makes the following claim: "Ordinary men can't compete [with me] because I am not a regular adorer of women. I am specialized, a champion of sexual desire." Hmmm. Such comments make me, as a man, want to be invisible. I said earlier that invisibility was the main trait of ghost-writing. No more. The famous Left Behind series has a very visible ghost writer in the person of Jerry Jenkins. It appears that Tim Lahaye's contributions to this series consisted of the original idea and thirty-page outlines for each book, or approximately one thirteenth of the total series. Lahaye's name sells the books, but the person who does the hard graft is Jerry Jenkins. Now Lahaye has expanded his outlining skills. Babylon Rising is the first of a new series that will be "a little lighter theologically," with an archaeologist hero similar to Indiana Jones. This time the visible ghost writer is Greg Dinallo, who is mostly known for several fast-paced Cold War thrillers written around the early 90s. Whether he will suit Lahaye's fastidious readers is another matter: the comment of one reviewer regarding Dinallo's own novel, Red Ink, is a little ominous: 'I would have preferred if this book had been written in invisible ink.' Maybe there's something to be said for being unacknowledged, after all. |
This column first appeared in the Anglican Taonga, NZ, 2003