Canada: The Manual

Canadian Flag

The first stage of Erin’s citizenship came through today: the three month wait between sending off Erin’s citizenship application, and Citizenship and Immigration Canada deigning to reply with “yes, we got your application”.

Another 12-15 months to go.

The response came with the booklet, “A Look at Canada”, which I suppose you could call an owners’ manual for the country. As a natural-born citizen, I’ve been looking for this book all my life.

Looking through it, though, I have to ask: where’s the troubleshooting section? You know: “what to do when your prime minister and opposition leader are putzes”?


Rosemary and Time Contract Arrived

Well, in electronic format, anyway. Barry sent it to me to review and approve before he sent over the hard copies to sign. It makes it that much more real…

It’s a standard first YA book contract: royalties in the 8-12% range, a small advance, a split of the film rights, that sort of thing. All bog standard and, to my mind, fair and above board. I’m looking forward to signing it.

I know a contract is a contract and you have to take it seriously, meaning that a lawyer has to go through it and write it up so that the wording leaves no room for surprises to materialize. Still, it produces some funny results. For instance, this is the definition of “Electronic Rights”:

“Electronic Rights,” including the exclusive right to use, adapt, or otherwise exploit the Work, or any portion thereof, alone or in conjunction with other matter, in computer-based and similar electronic media and technologies for data entry, storage, retrieval, transmission, display, and output of any and all kinds, and/or like media and technologies attaining similar results, whether now known or hereafter devised.

Which, roughly translated, I suspect means “we do not intend to be surprised by something like the Internet ever again.”

;-)

Under the terms of the contract, the “initial delivery date” of the finished manuscript is September 15, which makes sense for a Spring 2006 release, but which I suddenly realize is exactly seven weeks away. If there are to be edits, I’m going to have to get cracking!

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