The Ghost Blogger

No, I’m not talking about a blog written by Casper, Zack Wheat or one of those peripheral characters on Charmed.

Let’s say you currently author a weblog.  But your life is busy with outside obligations and you just don’t have time to park your gluteus maximus in your chair and type a blog post.  Next thing you know, you skip a couple of days, and then it’s harder to get back in there and write something down.  And you start getting self-conscious and you don’t post.  And when you log into your computer, you notice that the blog hasn’t been updated in a few days and people are getting cranky.

What to do, what to do…

Well, how does this sound.  There are people out there, that if the price is right, will actually write your blog for you.   They’ll write what you want to say, and your name will appear as the blog’s author.  And no one will be the wiser.

This of course follows on the heels of reports that celebrities actually hire people to compose tweets for them.  I guess when you’re a big-time celebrity and you don’t have time to meet with every one of your fans, you hire someone to update a twitter account for you.

Wow…

What if I actually CONSIDERED hiring someone to write my blog?

What would the ramifications be?

Yeah I know, some of you might throw some snarky comments in about the blog having less references to trivia and Iverhill and whatnot.  But let’s take that one step further.

This isn’t a blog where one must glean tons of information from various sources and then compile it into something readable.  This is a blog of personal observations and personal insight.  Chuck Miller’s personal insight.  Not someone else’s.

Okay, before anybody gets any preconceived notions, I can state unequivocally that I, Chuck Miller, have written every single one of the nearly 900 blog posts credited to me.  That also includes pictures I took for my “Caption Time” series, as well as pictures of which I own the copyright.  That does not include quotations in my blog that came from other sources, which are noted as such.  But I did author every one of these blog posts, whether in the middle of the night or on a clear sunny afternoon.  I did not employ any assistants operating under specious sobriquets to do my work.

Two reasons for that.  First one, if it’s got my name on it, it better have my words and thoughts.

Second reason – I don’t have that kind of spare change to be throwing at people to do what I could do for myself.

But be that as it may…

There are times when I thought about bringing in an assistant, someone whom I could call at a moment’s notice, dictate what I want to say in a blog, and let them put it together for me.

But doing that would invariably compromise the relationship I have with you, the reader.  You come to this blog every day for a new blog post.  And I provide it to you.  And whether you like what I post, or whether you don’t like it, you know it’s coming from me.  And I’ll back up what I say, whether I’m wrong or right, whether I’m left or right.

Besides, what benefit would it be to you if you didn’t like something on my blog?  You would write back to me, “Hey Chuck, I didn’t like what you wrote.”  And I would write back, “Wait a minute, I didn’t write this.  The person I hired to write it wrote it.”

The next response from you might be, “Well, if you didn’t write that… what other things did you not write?”

And at that point it’s not “Chuck Miller, writer, photographer, trivia champion and survivor.”

Then it’s “Chuck Miller, who paid someone else to write for him because he couldn’t be bothered to pen his own work.”

You never have to use that statement when referring to my blog.

Let some other soul toil anonymously for someone else’s credited work.   It’s their choice.

Just like it’s my choice to not use a ghost blogger.