Wait until next year

Been on a bit of a Joan Didion binge this week. I wish I’d read more of her work earlier. I also wish I had something profound about what I’ve read so far. She certainly knows her way around a sentence – it is one thing to tell a compelling tale, it is another thing to tell it beautifully.

Image from Incase. via Flickr

Right, a brief dispatch amongst all the fun and games of Real Life (some genuinely fun, some a little less so). In the absence of my awkward writing, why not read something worth reading? To wheel out the tired old saying, if you read one thing this week, read this:

The Ghost Writes Back

It is a longform essay from a former ghostwriter of the Sweet Valley High books. But bear with me here. It is not only a great insight into the dark art of ghostwriting, it is a meditation on authorship and ownership and a lovely memoir of a writer making compromises and being necessarily multifaceted to get on in life. Writing teen dramas sounds like fun too. Anyway, enough of my babbling, go and read it now. It is brilliant.