Promised pictures of the real Twilight Nija so here she is (and her big sister, too.) Mom sewed on Noble Girl’s costume for about twenty-four hours straight.

Both ventured out into the night and scored beaucoup de candy.

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Rachael, the bright center of my small universe, is in her first year as an Art major at the University of Texas.

Explaining the image to the right, in her own words:

In my three-dimensional foundations course we had a day off near to Halloween. Our teacher brought in candy, a projector and pumpkins. The candy was delicious and we watched Clue and Edward Scissorhands through the projector. With the pumpkins we weren’t really getting a grade, it was a just for fun deal. Our teacher thought it would be nice, and it was.

Our first project in the class had used bailing wire. I didn’t like it. The wire tended to cut the crap out of me as I tried to bend it into shape. There was still some wire about from that project and I decided to use it on my pumpkin.

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My older daughter, here referred to as Sarcasm Girl (hey, she’s sixteen) has a serious acting jones. She’s wanted to be an actress since she saw her first Broadway show at age 4, which means that, like everything else, it’s probably all my fault. The kid has talent, and is willing to work for what she wants, so we’ve tried to support her aspirations without mentioning too often that acting is a worse way to make a living than writing, for crissakes. All this led to me sitting in a hotel ballroom on Sunday morning, listening to a presentation about a school of modeling and acting. Since a lot of the kids at the workshop were not, um, runway material, the presentation to the parents focused on other benefits the program offers: grooming and etiquette training, ability to speak before others, poise, heightened self-esteem. And this last was clearly what they were selling. And why?

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While taking Older Daughter to school this morning, I heard an NPR Morning Edition commnetary by “recovering” ghost writer and Adjunct Instructor of Journalism, Barbara Feinman-Todd. She talks about the glory-that-is-not ghost writing. (She was the Ghost behind Hillary Clinton’s It Takes A Village.)

The most interesting bit I found was when she discusses finding a press clipping telling that “a well-known actress had actually written her autobiography without the aid of a ghost writer” and wonders “what does it say about our culture that we take note when people really are the authors of the books that bear their names.” Listen here.

She also wrote a lovely article about ghost writing (in which she discusses the It Takes A Village project) here.

In it she quotes from a 1997 New York Times piece: “On any given week, up to a half of any nonfiction best-seller list is written by someone other than the name on the book. Add those authors who feel enough latent uneasiness to bury the writer’s name in the acknowledgments and the percentage, according to one agent, reaches as high as 80.”