Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Lawyers!

So the nice publisher sent me a contract.  Cool.  Except that I know nothing about publishing contracts.  I have signed a couple of contracts before, mainly to buy and sell the couple of houses I've owned over the years.  I have a rudimentary little contact I use for the tenants in our rental unit.  And, I've signed exactly one work-related contract, desperately, with no negotiation and little understanding of what it was I was putting my name on. 

When I signed on the real estate deals, I had an agent or a loan officer explain them to me.  The rental contract came from an on-line service for landlords.  The work contract is the only one I've had to handle on my own, and I don't want to repeat the way that one worked out.  So before I sign the contract for my novella, I want someone to look at it, someone who is neutral to the process and can answer my questions, even the ones I don't know I should be asking.

It's harder than I thought it would be.  There wasn't a big list when I used the search terms, Lawyers/Publishing/Seattle on Google.  Through my writing teacher I found the Washington Lawyers for the Arts, a group that runs a low-cost clinic twice a month.  I have an appointment with them next Monday.  She also connected me with an agent, who forwarded me on to another agent, who I will be contacting today.  I figure, the more information, the better. 

It's a process, and I'm learning, so that's good.  It feels slow, but I guess that's better than rushing into something that I don't fully understand.  In the meantime, I'm working on Diva and wrapping up Christine's Make Your First 50 Pop class and trying to figure out how I'm going to eek out time to write when I've got kids home all day competing with me for computer time.

Wednesday, June 1, 2011

Trust

When I was in college, back in 1984 in Honolulu, I wanted to be a writer or a singer.  What I ended up with was a nursing degree.  The loop in my head said, "you can't be a writer or a singer because those activities are too self-indulgent and you need to do something that helps people more."  Therefore, nursing. 

The joke's on me.  Though I have no doubt that along the way I managed to provide at least one human being with the kind of altruistic, self-sacrificial aide that the loop in my head required, that's not what nursing is about for me.  It's a job that's heavy on technology and science, where I get to work every day with really smart people who are willing to take on the challenges presented by fragile preterm infants.  And, though I swear this was never a goal when I started out, I make a pretty nice living doing it.

I thought I was doing what God wanted me to do.  I thought that the loop in my head came from God as it guided my decision-making.  Along the way I kept singing, and now my main gig is as cantor for my church.  See, he's using my gifts, right?  So what do I do now that the loop in my head is telling me to write, and what I want to write are little vampire romances?  It bothers me that there's not much Jesus in those stories.

I'm almost 50, and if there's one thing all these years (25!) of nursing has taught me is how little I know.  I don't know why some babies live and some don't.  I don't know why God is so perfect and man's organized attempts to worship are so....not.  I trust in something bigger than me to sort it all out in the end.  I'm going to do that here, too.  If I open myself up and let the words come (the way I maybe should have done 30 years ago), God will find a way to use them, even though they may not be overtly religious.  I trust.