As a mom trying to work from home, I’m not exactly rolling in dough. And so, when money gets tight, necessity implores me to write. More.
Thus far I’ve been able to scrape by, picking up random assignments here and there, but my most lucrative job to date was ghostwriting for the teen romance series Sweet Valley High.
Over the course of four years, I penned 13 books in two different SVH series. It was gratifying to fill the pages with all of my leftover teen angst, but the irony was that years earlier, as a summer camp counselor, I had actually refused to read these very books to my 10-year-old charges.
Every night at bedtime, I offered to read to the dozen or so campers in my bunk, and every night, to my chagrin, they would eschew my thoughtful suggestions — “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” “Harriet the Spy” — in favor of a Sweet Valley saga.
For anyone who has never read these books, I can sum them up quickly. Set in sunny southern California, they revolve around the lives of 17-year-old identical twin sisters with, “long blonde hair, aquamarine eyes, and slim, athletic builds.” Bleah.
They were saccharine and shallow, but eventually I broke down and agreed to read one. I lasted about three pages before I began interjecting my own sentences into the text.
When Jessica — the younger, ditzier twin — was described as beautiful and glamorous, a shoo-in for Sweet Valley Queen, I added, “She was also very intelligent and planned to use the scholarship money she would win to help pay for medical school.”
I thought my transitions were flawless, but I suppose some of the girls may have caught on. After all, it wasn’t common for Jessica to think, “These shoes are perfect ... for the charity ball I’ve organized to stamp out hunger.” But even if they did realize that I was tinkering with the text, I doubt any of them thought that I would ever actually be writing it. I certainly didn’t but, as I said, necessity is the mother of a lot of things, and when you need to make a buck, sometimes work you wouldn’t have considered in more idealistic times becomes, in fact, ideal.
For years when people asked me what kind of writing I did, I answered with a self-deprecating, “Smut for kids.” But looking back over my SVH career, I’m actually quite proud of it. I like to think that I fleshed out some of those characters more completely than another writer may have. I tried to give the bitchy girl a soft side, the flake a little depth and the goody two shoes a bit of sass. And through it all my writing continued to improve. Which brings me to the present.
Against all odds, I’m still managing to support myself doing what I love to do.
Of course, balancing work with family is another story — and another column — entirely. Stay tuned ...
Belinda Ray is a homeschooling mother and freelance writer who finds time to write when her children and their friends have lightsaber battles in the yoga room (but only if the laundry is already folded and everyone's been fed).