First, if you somehow missed it yesterday, Random House changed the deal terms for its e-book only imprints as a result of the outcry from authors’ groups this last week.  See Victoria Strauss’s post about it here: Random House Announces New Terms at Digital Imprints Hydra, Alibi, Loveswept, and Flirt.  She’s the one that really highlighted the issue first and she worked with them on getting the contracts changed.

Also, discovered courtesy of Scalzi, here’s a post by Evan Gregory on why a no advance contract may not be the worst thing on the planet: In Defense of the Royalty-Only Model for Digital Publication.

And this post by Seth Godin was inspiring to me: The moment of highest leverage.

Basically, my takeaway is that right now, when I’m a nobody that no one cares about is the time to take all those risks.  I think I blogged about this concept at some point recently – that I won’t be able to take risks like this again until I’m at the top/end of my career…so time to try new things and not care what anyone thinks.

Of course, he says it simply and clearly whereas I ramble and spew…(On that note: I did finish that short story written as a rule filing.  Now I’m just waiting long enough for my betas to be ready to read another story by me.  They really, really liked the last two, but this one won’t be like that.  Very different writing style.  What can I say?  I’m like one of those 30-sided D&D dice.  Never know what number’s going to come up.)

(By the way, it sounds like they’re moving a dead body in the hall outside my apartment right now, so if I suddenly disappear…)

Also, lynxchild, Alison J. McKenzie, was kind enough to nominate me for the Liebster Blog Award.  I’m kind of horrible with these things as a couple others have learned, but I did answer two of her questions on the About page.  Also, while I was visiting her blog, I caught up on her recent posts (I’ve been bad about that since I’ve been in Prague), and there were a few great ones I’d missed.

One, The Unashamed Female Writer, about her choice to use her real, female name when writing.  As you might recall, I have a weird, weird first name, so I have chosen the most neutral pen name I could find.  (At least it’s neutral to me.)  But I do like the argument she’s making for owning who she is in her writing.

Two, I’m Not an Editor, about how if you’re going to write you should know the basics, like punctuation.  And spelling.  Nothing more to say about that than “yep.”

Also, completely not writing related.  But I linked to this post on my Facebook page yesterday: Is There Life After Work and it’s worth sharing widely, IMO.

I’ve known a number of career men and women who have done very well work-wise and found themselves in their mid 30’s (or later) sort of wondering what the hell happened to them.  These are the men and women who are in the office on weekends, answering emergency calls from work at dinner, etc.  Usually divorced by 40 or dealing with children who are out of control in some way.

They’re making good money.  But.  But…I think most would choose to do it differently if given the chance to do so.  (One of my short stories is about this idea.  Not published, of course…Anyway.)

We each make our own choices about how to live our lives, but I think it’s worth the occasional pause to make sure you’re really doing what you want to do and haven’t just fallen into a pattern of behavior you’ll later regret.

A few quotes from the article:

“I didn’t have to be on my BlackBerry from my first moment in the morning to my last moment at night. I didn’t have to eat the majority of my meals at my desk. I didn’t have to fly overnight to a meeting in Europe on my birthday. I now believe that I could have made it to a similar place with at least some better version of a personal life. Not without sacrifice — I don’t think I could have ‘had it all’ — but with somewhat more harmony.”

“I have also wondered where I would be today if Lehman Brothers hadn’t collapsed. In 2007, I did start to have my doubts about the way I was living my life. Or not really living it. But I felt locked in to my career. I had just been asked to be C.F.O. I had a responsibility. Without the crisis, I may never have been strong enough to step away.”

That second one really ties back into Seth Godin’s post from above, too.  And when I was in business school I heard more than one entrepreneur tell us that the best thing that happened in their life was being fired or losing their job in some unexpected way, because it freed them up to actually try a new path.

Life won’t always be so kind to you.  Sometimes you have to fire yourself to go down that new path…