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.