Jenna Glatzer, Ghostwriter

Dear Rene, When we first met, you wanted to introduce me to everybody. Everybody. I was there to interview you and Celine for her biography, but you wanted to make sure that everyone had a chance to speak to me if they wanted to, because they were all a part of Celine's success. You introduced me to musicians, lighting and sound crew, backstage help, casino staff, the caterer... you told me the caterer's specialty and suggested I come back to try it. You introduced everyone with the same respect, the same level of importance. Later, when you walked me back out to the casino, you were beyond cordial when a group of fans came over to talk to you. It wasn't for appearances; you were so happy they were there-- so appreciative that they had traveled to come see Celine. Even though this happens every day, all the time, it still touched you and you still wanted to ask questions about their hometown. You introduced them to me, too! "When Rene likes something, he want...

My latest op/ed for the Washington Post is about protesting police brutality without unfairly stereotyping police officers: I'm a white suburbanite who supports the police. I marched for #BlackLivesMatter anyway

Photo credit: Kelly ODonnell First, let me tell you about our big feat earlier this month. I've wanted to be a foster mom for a long time, but that's not in the cards right now. Being a single mom with a crazy schedule isn't going to work. But every few months, I find myself drifting back to the "waiting child" websites and the encouraging "you don't have to be perfect to be a foster parent!" campaigns. I read My Orange Duffel Bag by Sam Bracken and my soul sister Echo Garrett, about Sam's journey from abuse and homelessness to success. I learned about the dismal statistics for kids in foster care-- how most kids are just dumped when they turn 18, with nowhere to go and few people to help them. They often wind up in homeless shelters, and more than half of the young men wind up in prison at some point. (In fact, 70 percent of the prison population has been in foster care.) Less than 5 percent of them graduate from college, and their rate...

This is pretty sweet... Barnes & Noble is going to be featuring Never Ever Give Up: The Inspiring Story of Jessie and Her JoyJars on their "New Release" tables in their big stores from September 9-22, and they're also recommending it as a Top Teen Pick! (Thanks, Barnes & Noble!) That's pretty huge for us-- and to celebrate, Jessie's dad Erik is offering an amazing deal: Take a picture of the book at Barnes & Noble. Buy a copy and send him the picture. (I don't want to list his email address here and subject him to spammers, so instead I'll tell you to write to him through the website: www.negu.org .) In return, now through the 22nd, he will send you a signed copy FREE! So you get to keep one and give one to a friend. If you want to make sure it's available near you, check Barnes & Noble here: Next to the "Add to Bag" button is a link that says "Pick Up in Store." Click that and it'll ask for your zip ...

One of my high school friends, Cliff Gibbons, went through a tough cancer battle a couple of years ago. He became more in tune with other people who were struggling, too, and realized that he couldn't even imagine going through it as a kid. He posted a link on Facebook to a fan page for Jessie Rees, an 11-year-old who'd recently been diagnosed with a brain tumor. She and her dad kept up the page, frequently updating it to let people know what she was up to, how treatments were going, and asking for prayers. I became a fan of hers and followed her journey. The amazing thing about it was that Jessie immediately wanted to do something positive. She saw that there was a floor full of kids at her hospital (Children's Hospital of Orange County) who didn't go home in between treatments the way she did. So she asked her parents, "How can we help them?" They were too caught up in the fact that their own daughter was just starting cancer treatments to give much of...

I'm an infrequent Tweeter. Don't spend much time on Twitter, but I recently read about the #YesAllWomen movement and realized I had way too much to add to it. I chose one story I thought I could tell in 140 characters, posted it, and forgot about it. The story is this: I was on a crowded train in Boston. I was about 18. There were no seats left, so I held onto a strap. An Asian man moved over to stand right behind me. I thought that was odd... there were other places to stand. Even right next to me would have been fine, but why did he need to stand right behind me? Then I felt him pressing up against me. At first I thought it must have been an accident. I was profoundly uncomfortable, but said nothing. I gave him the benefit of the doubt, thinking maybe he was oblivious. Then he shifted and pressed into me harder. I still thought he might be oblivious, but I moved over. He followed me and did it again. Now I was terrified. I looked around me on the train, trying to make e...

I just read an article on Salon that bothered me a lot. It's here: The Day I Left My Son In the Car. In short, the writer tried to run an errand with her 4-year-old, but he didn't want to go into the store, so she left him in the car for 5 minutes or so while she went in to shop. A bystander saw this, recorded it, and called police. The writer spends much of the article minimizing her actions: it wasn't hot, it was just a quick errand, all her friends are doing it, it's no big deal. She's very mad at the person who called police. And the comments mostly mirror her thoughts-- no big deal, no real risk. In fact, the comment that set me off was this one: "The risk of anything bad happening in those 5 minutes was so absolutely miniscule to not be worth mentioning." I'm here as a reminder of that miniscule risk. I was kidnapped and raped by a serial rapist when I was 10 years old. Maybe others don't think it's worth mentioning, but it wa...

People sometimes say to me, "It must be SO HARD having someone else get credit for your writing!" But it's not, really. Just about all of my clients have remained my friends, and I'm very happy to see them succeed. And maybe I've just worked with really nice people, but the majority of them not only do give me a shared cover credit (by So and So with Jenna Glatzer), but also make it a point to thank me in the acknowledgments and mention me in interviews when they can. I feel I get plenty of credit most of the time. (If you're wondering who usually doesn't want to acknowledge my role, I'll tell you: doctors. I guess they worry it puts their expertise in question.) What I usually write are memoirs and true crime stories, and here's what really IS hard: dialogue. Often, the toughest part of writing someone else's story is trying to come up with dialogue that will help the reader get a sense of everyone's voice and personality. But intervie...

I've followed a bit of the "YesAllWomen" and "NotAllMen" Twitter stuff, and as usual, it's taken me a few days to put my thoughts together. Here's what I'd like to say to the men: Guys, of course we know that you're not all woman-hating sleazebuckets. But too many men are. That's why women are too often put into situations where we have to worry about our personal safety, even when we've been cautious. I don't go to bars because men do creepy things there. Do you ever think to yourself, "I'm not going to go to a bar tonight because a woman may scare me, follow me to my car, and not take 'no' for an answer?" I can't put those cute little stickers on the back of my car showing my real family dynamic: just me and my daughter, because if I do, it's more likely that a man will see that I'm unprotected and break into my home. I hold my keys between my fingers in parking garages in case I need to...

I'm a top-500 Amazon reviewer, which means that companies and authors often write to ask me to review their stuff. I look forward to that and usually love doing it, but every now and then a request comes in that's really unethical, obnoxious, or crazy. Herewith, I present some of my least favorite types of review requests so that if you are a company or author seeking reviewers on Amazon, you'll have a better idea what we top Amazon reviewers like and don't like. 1. "Please help me out." Probably my most frequently-received bad request is from self-published authors asking me to help them out because "this is my first novel and I put it on Amazon yesterday and I could really use feedback!" I don't review out of pity. I don't select anything for review that I wouldn't have been interested enough to consider buying, so I won't review things that sound amateurish or are in genres that don't interest me a lot. As a ...

Congratulations to Jennifer Kennedy! Random.org chose you as the winner of the BlissLights green Spright. Hope it helps to light up your holidays!

On Halloween, we admired a neighbor's house-- it was lit up with thousands of tiny green lights. Looked a lot like this: On first glance, it looked like she had hung icicle lights all over the house, but when we got closer, we realized the lights were projected from a small device on the edge of her walkway: "BlissLights," it read. I asked the woman who owned the house about it and she said, "Aren't they great? I found them on QVC. When it's Christmas time, I just add the red lights, too." Not only did I think it looked great-- like stars in the night sky-- but it dawned on me that this was exactly what I wanted for my new house. This marks my first year as a single homeowner, and it hasn't gone as smoothly as one might hope in my situation... mold in the kitchen cabinets, a contractor who ruined my floor, a broken washing machine, no heat... the problems have seemed never-ending, and most of them are beyond my abilities to fix. I pride myself ...

Politicians are excellent at saying deeply stupid things. Recently, US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan was defending the much-hated Common Core when he said, "It’s fascinating to me that some of the pushback is coming from, sort of, white suburban moms who-- all of a sudden-- their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were, and that’s pretty scary." Hi, Arne. Thought I'd give you a little educating of your own. When I was pregnant with my daughter, I prayed what lots of people might consider a strange prayer: "Please let her be smart, but not too smart." I was on the verge of "too smart" in early elementary school. I was the smartest in my class most of the time, and I did feel isolated and different. I didn't want that for her. Now let me tell you what I got: a child who is far more gifted than I ever was. She asked me to teach her to read when she was 2 and to...

"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...