Story in next issue of Apex

So I just got my contract from Apex Digest for my first pro publication, "I Can't Look at the City." The editor, Jason Sizemore, has been fantastic to work with, always accessible by e-mail and keeping me up to date on when my story's coming out.

So it will be in issue 11, the issue after this one. The nice thing about Apex is it's well distributed, so it's available in pretty much every Barnes & Noble. So please check it out. I will post when Issue 11 hits the shelves.

Problems I'd like to have

I read a lot of agent blogs, because as an aspiring writer I follow their careers like normal people obsess over baseball players. I have seen a few different agents refer to a particularly brutal turn in the Simon & Schuster boilerplate contract where they apparently get to keep the writer's testicles in a jar (ovaries for a female author, of course) for the author's natural lifetime. The Rejecter gets Simon & Schuster's take, which is apparently that first of all the testicles are very well preserved, and second of all any serious writer is going to be far too busy to make any use of them.

And, being in the place that I am in my life, the only thing I can think about is how much I wish I was in a position where I had to decide whether to sign a contract like that. I can pretty much visualize the conversation:

SLEAZY PUBLISHING LAWYER: I think you'll find it's all a pretty standard industry contract. Just sign on that line.

Smoke drifts from behind the lawyer and his devil tail is briefly visible

MY AGENT (Preferably played by Ethan Ellenberg or Caitlin Blasdell): Wait a minute! It says in clause 437.16.32q that if you don't make back your advance they get to sacrifice you to Yog Sothoth by pounding a nail through your head at midnight on a full moon.

Author holds pen over contract uncertainly.

AUTHOR: Oh, um, yeah, I see that. So what kind of nail is it exactly?

Obviously it's for people like me that agents were invented.