Jenna Glatzer, Ghostwriter

"What do you do?" the farmer asked me. "I'm a ghostwriter." "THAT'S SO COOL." "It pretty much is." "We're going to do a haunted house here in the fall. I should hire you to write a script for it." It should have occurred to me then what he thought I actually did for a living, but it didn't. I just nodded with a bit of confusion-- because I've never been to a haunted house that actually had a script-- but it took until much later for me to realize that he thought ghostwriters write stories about ghosts. I thought that was just a funny one-time occurrence until two other people recently asked me questions about ghosts and haunted houses. So I thought it was time to put this out there: Ghostwriters don't write stories about ghosts. We write books (and articles, blog posts, whatever) in other people's voices. We're called ghostwriters because we're meant to be invisible-- the books are not ...

By now, you've probably heard about the teenagers who trashed Brian Holloway's former home, but just in case: Former NFL player Brian Holloway lives in Florida now, but still has temporary ownership of his former residence, 742 NY #43 in Stephentown, NY. His son found out via Twitter that a bunch of kids had broken into the house and were throwing a huge-- and destructive-- party. The kids were taking photos and bragging about it on Twitter in real time. Police showed up and broke it up, and Brian understandably freaked out. Then he did something that drew a ton of attention: Instead of just pursuing criminal and civil charges, he called out the kids and their parents online, reposting their photos and naming names. And he invited them to redeem themselves by showing up to help him clean up the damage. While plenty of locals have shown up to help, only one teen from the party and one parent showed up the first day, and four showed up on a second clean-up day. Brian has be...

My recent move has been... well, eventful. It's been one of those experiences where you shout-sing Kelly Clarkson's "What doesn't kill you makes you STRONGER" as you're spackling and power-drilling and unclogging and fixing. One of the first things I wanted to take care of when I got here was an alarm system. I did my research and decided that SimpliSafe would be my best option: You own the system, no contracts, and it's simple to install yourself wirelessly. The company agreed to let me review the system for this blog. (Hey, thanks, guys.) As soon as it arrived, I began setting up the sensors, then the keypad and alarm. Just an hour after I got it all set up, one of the sensors started to chirp. Dang. I walked over to it and couldn't figure out what was wrong. So I did what reasonable people do in these situations: I gave it a little smack. It stopped chirping. Solved! I went back to work, but a minute later, the chirping started again. I adju...