Tuesday, 19 February 2002

The contracts for "Anger Management" arrived from the Why I Hate Aliens anthology, forthcoming from Bay Laural Ebooks. Usually when I've gotten contracts from publishers they've come unsigned so that I have to sign two copies and send both back to be executed by the publisher and one copy returned to me. But these came already signed by Tim Cooper the publisher. So, I signed 'em and put one copy back in the mail.

John Savage has talked a bit more about story structure in further entries in his journal, and Ron Collins has been commenting on what John has been writing. It's great fun to publish something, and then have other people deal seriously with the ideas that I presented.

The fun is slightly diminished by the fact that I've never gotten a contract for the article, nor been paid. I let the editor know when a couple months had passed after acceptance without a contract, and she contacted the publisher about it. When I saw the story was in print I sent a quick piece of email off to the publisher, but that note (and another sent a week later) have gone unanswered.

At this point, I'm not quite sure what to do about it. I suppose I'll see if I can get ahold of the publisher by way of mutual acquaintances. I don't think there's any intent to not pay me, probably contracts were mailed but went astray, and now the publisher has just been away from his email for the past couple of weeks. I expect it'll get straightened out sooner or later.

It bugs me, though, not getting the contracts and not getting paid. The amount of money involved is trivial; yet it bugs me anyway. I exchanged some email about it with my brother, who put his finger on just what the problem was. Speculations is all about being a professional writer. It's aimed at beginning and intermediate professional writers, but it's focus is all about doing things professionally. That sets a level of expectations. Steve went on to say:

The biggest impact is that for anyone to take Speculations seriously when it talks about what writers and publishers do, is for it to behave appropriately as well. You're angry because you take Speculations seriously and they're not living up to your estimation of them. If they can't even get this right, why would you bother to read their stuff?

But the $30 is meaningless. Your article got published and people are talking about it -- that's the important thing.

I've been very busy at work, but I'm finally having some success. Yesterday we found one of the bugs that had been keeping things from working, and today I coded up a fix for the bug and verified that it worked. So that was satisfying.

After work I took Jackie out to the Basmati so she could have masala dosa. (I had chicken tika, which is one of my favorites.)

Now it's late and I need to go to work early for teleconference with a group in Europe. so I'll wrap this up.