I still have no idea how Literary McAgent convinced Confused McManager to convince Mumbles McReality to cancel her trip to China and make herself available to me. Maybe it involved giving up some of her commission. Maybe it involved an expensive dinner and a bunch of drinks. Maybe it involved a blow job. I didn't know, and I didn't care (much). I was just happy that what was shaping up to be an entirely impossible gig improved to only a slightly impossible gig.
Over the next four days, I managed to get eight hours of Mumbles on tape, which wasn't anything close to enough material for a book, but I suspect that even if I had five times that much, it wouldn't have made a damn bit of difference, because the girl had nothing. No insightful stories about her childhood, no cute anecdotes about her castmates, no response to the rumors that she was gay, no comment on my gentle probing about her drug use, and, worst of all, no concrete answer to my questions about where she scored her weed. Since these tapes would yield me, at best, 30,000 words -- about 125-ish pages -- I was going to have to pull a book out of my ass.
So I did what any ghostwriter would've done: I went to the videotape.
I transcribed most every word that came out of her mouth on Your Reality Show of Shows, a painful endeavor, because Your Reality Show of Shows was the lamest reality show in the history of reality shows. (I'm not saying that from a snobby perspective; I likes me some quality reality tube as much as the next girl. I mean, without Top Chef, the world would be a bleaker place.) Since Mumbles got kicked off the show only seven weeks in, there wasn't much transcribing to do.
There's no exciting ending to this little tale. For the next two weeks, I wrote for 14-ish hours a day, somehow managing to complete a competent 60,000-word manuscript. And when I say 60,000 words, I mean 60,000 words. I couldn't have come up with another sentence if you put a bazooka to my boobs, but the editor was happy, and that was good enough for me.
It's possible that Mumbles read some of the first draft, but I'm certain she didn't make it through the whole thing, because after I emailed it over, she didn't give me one single editorial note, so the book that was eventually published to shitloads of derision was virtually the draft of the book that I turned in. Not one of my finer pieces of work, but it kept the lights on for a few more months, so there's that.
The moral to our story is, if you find yourself crashing a book for a weeded-up pseudo-celebrity, well, don't.
Next: Ghosty McGhostwriter Meets the Angry, Angry, Angry Stand-Up Comic.
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