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I just hit a professional wall and man did it hurt.
Let me back up a second.
You may not know this but I’ve been a ghostwriter for more than 30 years. Not someone writing ebooks and emails for people, although I’ve done that too.
I’m talking book-books and six-figure price tags.
I’m talking a royalty split.
Big fat, meaty books for naturopathic doctors.
Shocking behind-the-scenes tales detailing the chaos of a Hollywood life.
Heartwarming stories of loss and love, betrayal and transformations from everyday people.
I’m even talking finishing fiction when a beloved, bestselling author passes with a book, a series, a digital treasure-chest of ideas not yet written and a family, a publishing house desiring more.
More words, more books, more from the one they lost.
It’s been a fabulous journey and one I slowed down on a few years back—by choice.
I started to write more for me. Actually published for the very first time as me and not under the numerous pseudonyms I’ve embodied for decades.
Instead of steadily penning two or three books a year for others, I became selective with ghosting projects.
Instead of writing for others full out, I renovated an island house, built a sanctuary for my now 23 baby goat rescues and took a beat.
But about nine months ago, I got a call. A call that shifted the ground beneath my feet.
The call not from an assistant or a publicist but from the famous relative of someone even more famous who’d passed.
I had to take that call. Not because I was fan-girl impressed, although she was/is awesome, but because I was downright curious.
How in the world did this woman get my name, my number?
Want to chat with me?
And about what?
Apparently my name had some street creds, which wasn’t hard to imagine since all my ghostwriting work had literally poured in from past clients word-of-mouth referrals.
It was a fascinating call lasting all of 22 minutes and 15 seconds.
Yes, I clocked it. And even pinched myself a few times.
And took the job to write that book—a book about one of the most famous people on the planet, not a country, the planet—at minute 21 of that call.
She sold me and hard.
But in all fairness before I even picked up the phone and heard her introduce herself, I knew I was in.
It was that kind of project.
A once in a lifetime opportunity.
To go deep with the family. To learn all the good, the bad, the ugly and to craft it into lines, pages, chapters that fans around the world would read.
I knew it would be the most transformative work I’d ever written for another, and be translated into more languages than I could even count.
So we began . . .
I'll tell you what happened next tomorrow.
Jill “a lifetime opportunity taken” Stevens
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