damn

I love this opening:

Hello, my name is Angela, and I’m a ghost. 

Not the chain-rattling, woooo-oooooh kind. Or the leaving-a-faint-smell-of-hyacinths-in-the-air kind. I’m not going to haunt you. I’m not actually dead. 

Now I have to figure out why this is true.  I could say I'm unable to change, to reconcile past with present, or that I'm invisible or insubstantial in some way.  I could spin the truth until it said that.  But I don't want to go that way.  I'm actually feeling very embodied at the moment, and I think I'm dealing with the past pretty well.  So there has to be some other reason.

Maybe alter it a little and make ghosts instead of being a ghost?  That's much easier to make true; all my virtual furniture could easily be ghost furniture:

My name is Angela, and I make ghosts. 

Not the chain-rattling, woooo-oooooh kind. Or the leaving-a-faint-smell-of-hyacinths-in-the-air kind.  I don't kill people.  I make furniture.

I like it, but not as much. 

So what else does it mean to be a ghost?  Besides the physical traits, which I don't have.  Or the not-letting-go traits, which I don't want to work with.  I'm certainly not elusive.  I do a few archaic things, but not in an archaic fashion.

I could have a best friend who's a ghost.  Making Sheila a ghost would be easy, too.  But that story already stalled out, and I'm not sure I could make it work now.  Plus, I'd want to cannibalize what I've already started on that one, and that's cheating.

Damn.

So, how much help am I allowed to get here?  I would never want anyone to write for me, but a conceptual sounding board would be pretty damn useful right about now.