It's a Ghost

Well, I can't really hide this secret anymore, so I better get ahead of the story.  It started, innocently enough, with a tip from a family member of mine, who suggested that I use an outfit in Laos to proofread my blog posts before they went live.  Since I've never spent a dime of money on my blog, I was skeptical, until I found out how cheap this service is and how much time I would be saving by doing this.  Since time is money, and the money was so little and my time so scarce, I decided to give it a try.

Well, proofreading services turned into wholesale writing suggestions, link-finding, and Internet research.  At one point in my weekly check-in chat, I joked with my Laotian contact, Prydali, that he was good enough to fill in for me if I ever wanted to take a break.  It turns out "Master P" (my nickname for him; I've never met him in person, nor have I seen a picture of him, so in my mind I just conjure up an image of a Laotian version of Master P) had been thinking the same thing, and three months of copy-editing for me had attuned him to my interests and my cadence.  He immediately sent me three sample posts that he had created on his own time, and I was floored: it was like reading myself, only I had no recollection of having ever written any of it.  We ended up running two of those three posts, no one raised an eyebrow, and I was hooked.  He proceeded to ghost-write at least once a week just to mix things up and give me a break, plus he took over full-time during a three-week period late in which I was particularly jammed up and didn't have the time to blog.

Looking back on my archives, P didn't quite get me right away, but I only say that to say that his later writings are even more eerily spot-on, so they make his earlier writings relatively shaky by comparison.  But that's besides the point.  The point of today's post is to out myself as not being the only contributor to Musings.  In fact, since the New Year, I'm easily in the minority; P has probably done 60 to 70 percent of the posts in 2012.

He's channeling me, so it's still my blog, in a sense; but my secretive use of a ghost writer is a burden I now feel I must disclose, lest I feel like a total sham.  I hope you'll still consider checking me out here; I assure you I'm never going to turn over all of my posts to Master P. If anything, you're getting more of me than I can produce myself.  Still, I'm sorry if you're disappointed in my deception.