But Will They Take Good Care of My Baby?

I remember the day I sent my oldest out into the world. After nurturing the dear little thing for years – staying up nights, missing sleep, caring for my child, putting everything else on hold so I could give her my full attention, even to the detriment of the other parts of my life - I loaded her in a box, sealed it, said a prayer and put her in the (I hoped) capable hands of my friendly local USPS counter-person.

Oh, and did the world beat on her. She was callously rejected over and over. Some came with reasons (and those reasons never seemed to coagulate into a pattern), some merely with a photocopied strip of paper that read, "not for us." Not even a thank you. Or an apology. Apparently, five years of labor only merited three small words. And we didn't even get the courtesy of a verb. Or a subject. I couldn't diagram this sentence to the satisfaction of my seventh grade English teacher.

All I did was sigh, and put all the pieces of paper into a manila file in my filing cabinet, and sent her calling card, as it were, to the next batch of agents on my list.

That was fifteen years ago. Since then, I've sent other children out into the cold cruelty of Agentville. Some were received with more interest than others. Most ended up – like so many of our grown children – coming back home. Fortunately, they don't take up much space, so they're all bunking in my closet, along with my wedding gown (gotta sell that thing) and out of season clothing that probably doesn't even fit anymore.

But this one…this one child was special. Yes, I still have little ones, unformed and too weak to be on their own. But this one of my babies, she had something. People loved her. Yet for some reason, she never made it big.

Finally, I set her up myself, got some good responses, but without the power of a larger entity, she languished.

Then I figured, what the hell. What's one more audition, for old time's sake? Only this time, we went directly to the publisher. A nice little place, it seemed, not one of those "stamp-'em out, send-'em out" mills where she'll never get noticed among the shoutier examples of her kind.

Soon we were looking at a contract. It comes with a price, as does pretty much anything. They want her "fixed up" a little. Nip a little here, tuck a little there. Well…a lot. But that's how it works these days, right? The one with the power calls the shots.

So OK. I agreed with that part. But the contract…I'm not sure. I've never signed anything like this in my life. And people I've asked say, "But your agent is supposed to cover that, right?"

Uh…right…sure…if that's what you say.

Meanwhile, she and I are doing our homework. We're getting good advice and support from our lovely, wise and wonderful friends. And once I hone down my list of questions to some reasonable requests (small presses don't exactly have the marketing budgets for book tours and giant advances and, well…much of anything other than a promise to print the book and let you buy a bunch of them, if you want to sell some yourself), we move on to negotiation. Hopefully that will go smoothly. And hopefully, that will lead to an opportunity for me to share some very good news with you.

Right now I have some other good news: Today I hit 25K in my NaNo creation, and actually started sparking with ideas that, strung together, resemble a plot. She's got a spine! My baby's got a spine! I can't wait to meet her.

The miracle of birth, I tell ya…just wish I could do something about these stretch marks.