Baby-sitting Contract

"Don't use your children like that -- it's shameful."  It's a paraphrase of a quote from "Dead Like Me," when a woman attempts to use her kid being in the car to cut into line at the post office.

I'm Child Free.  Does that mean I hate kids?  No, it means being a parent is something I would never do to a child.  I'm obsessive, judgmental, hot-tempered and can be downright mean.  So nobody who should be raising a kid (and I could COUNT when I was seven, and saw the future population numbers.  I later realized that being a parent doesn't guarantee permanent effect -- atheists usually come from religious households, after all).

However, I'm a GREAT aunt.  I'll take your kid horseback riding and to cookout parties and down to the swimming hole.  Of course, I'll also let your kid get into the Triple-sec-soaked marshmallows and take turns body-surfing the rapids until somebody's bleeding.  Just sayin.'

However, I never volunteered to baby-sit your kid.

The following is a legal contract, that will be applied in the cases described, and you are required to have knowledge of it:

"The next person who dares to get between me and adult events, books, movies or whatever, because their 14-year-old daughter (for example) happened to walk into the bondage panels at Norwescon (for example), and causes me any loss of time and enjoyment or money for the sake of their kid - he or she is getting a bill for my art rates, and those start at $80.00 an hour.

And if s/he has the gall to squawk, "Are you a parent?" then it will be $120 an hour, as a nuisance fee, under Arrogant Cluelessness.

I will assume you, as the parent, gave the kid permission to be involved in my activities in the first place.

If you miss your payment, you will be billed monthly, and 5% accruing interest will start at the 1st of each non-paid month.

This is a legal contract.

If you claim you've never read it after getting the bill, ignorance is no excuse.  So do your job and explain to your kid that, while THOSE people are doing it -- it's for grownups, and the kid doesn't get to do it until s/he is an adult, too.

Oh - and if you find alcohol on the premises at Comicons run by me, remember that a lot of these secure spaces are in Lion's Clubs, or Elk's Clubs, etc. - and those old farts have booze in the cupboards. Watch your kids' fingers, and remind them that most things are for grownups - they just have to wait a few years.

Signed this day -- September 7, 2011 (further additions, August 9, 2012) -- by Donna Barr

Additional Corollary, 27 July, 2014: This contract applies to people who decide their imaginary gods or other fandoms can intrude on the fun of consenting adults and reasonable parents. Come in here and start spouting how Jesus hates gay people or Allah hates women, and making people feel all sad and guilty, and you'll be billed for the same time, because you're using our space to abuse other people. Amen."

Me and Padawan Learner in the Chehalis River.  So there.

Who Can We Screw Now?

There's a reason I refuse to publish my friends.  Becoming a publisher meant I Went To The Dark Side:  publishing other people is Going Asshole.

Now Marvel and the Kirby family are at each other's throats. If they discover any evidence Jack (I use that as a comics-industry title of respect) was forced to sign a Yellow-Dog Contract -- had no choice or chance to negotiate -- then the family may have something.  If not, he was working for hire, and let's hope he put money in a good fund for the grandkids.

I had a chance to make good money once, but the publisher wanted full copyright -- for a mere $150.00 a page.  When are publishers going to get it through their heads that copyright is expensive?  I would have gladly signed a work-for-hire contract if there'd been copyright-level money in it.  As it is, I have the art and I plan to share it any old way I want.  Let's face it -- if they can't afford to pay you full price, they can't afford to sue you either.

My editor at the Peninsula Daily News (and I have to cut the poor woman some slack; the publisher is in the same office, right where he can see her, and they have a culture of blame-to-not-pay in that place) is pulling on the next guy what she pulled on me.  After a recent blame game they couldn't resist so they didn't have to pay me, I decided they'd get work from me -- for anything -- if they caught up on their bills.  

Now they've found another photographer, and guess what?  They owe him $300.00.  I wonder how long they'll take to run through him.  My editor at The Forks Forum pays promptly when I bill the company -- and once (I swear to gods!) reminded me to bill him three days into a new billing period!  No, honest to gods!

This guy just started photographing for them, and they owe him triple digits?  WTF?  Years ago I had to virtually beg for $20.00 for a photo and $35.00 for an article.  I'm not blaming the photographer -- he's just doing his job -- but what are they paying him?  And why?  If this is because he has the danglies, they may not know how much trouble they're in.  If it's because he's a very hard and eager worker -- and he seems to be, then more power to him.  If not, they better think about their payment structure.

The Forum pays me even less, but they're the "country weekly" that's made fun of in The Devil Bat, an old movie with Bella Legosi and a couple smart-alecky newspaper workers who must have been written by Ben Hecht.  And you know the shape small newspapers are, with every podunk business up here demanding stories along with the ads.  I think they've finally all heard my joke:  "Ads are like male prostitutes.  You get the inches you paid for."  (Why am I repeating any of this?  Kipling took these people apart in The Man Who Must Be King).

Our county commissioner -- in front of a sheriff's deputy -- sneered about how hard I worked and how little I got paid.  With me standing there (at least he did that much).  The fire department's buddy sent in a rant about me -- and the PDN PUBLISHED IT.  So if anybody's crying about lost coverage up here, you can blame those people.  I won't work for people who won't pay me, won't back me up, and make fun of me.  The commissioner, at least, has realized he better be nice to me.  I'm all they got up here to save the papers gasoline on anything but Bleed Lead stories, and I CAN SPELL AND USE GRAMMAR.  Only one other person up here can do that, and she's smart enough to devote her time to the library.

It doesn't help that there are a couple of amateur papers up here that are taking ads -- and using volunteer stories.  Not a person up here can get it through their heads that, if they want to be part of the arts and tourism industry, they have to be paid for what they do.  Especially when there's ad money involved.  Then again, they think renovating a building makes you a "hero."  Yeah, THAT culture.  

They all run around saying "we" about the Mariners (you know... that fan culture that thinks they're on the field and don't mind guv'ment money getting used to build stadiums while the roads fall apart?).  Do they ever notice the only people who ever really get paid in sports are all those media people, including the artists, writers and photographers?  It's like 1910 out here for industry, and the 1950's for the attitude toward unions and workers' rights.

Maybe if the Photosynthesis Festival comes back again, they can begin to understand artists get paid.  Our local gallery owner -- lovely lady -- was freaked over the prices those people charge.  Welcome to REAL prices and rights for creatives.  The Makah seem to realize this.  Maybe all the trouble I've described is just more Stupid White People tricks.  Then again, the First Nations people invented copyright -- it just took palefaces a couple centuries to try to sort it out, mostly because we don't seem to have the Respect gene.

A local deputy who really enjoyed working the festival was telling people, "Under all those pretty clothes, they're real capitalists!"  His tone sounded as though he thought they were being hypocritical.  I THINK I got through his head that "no socialism = no capitalism."  No roads, no clean environment, no health care, no jobs people really want to do and not used as a stranglehold, and how can anybody buy anything?  I love that moment when the eyes begin to boggle and you can see the ideas leaking in.  I think it was when I said, "I'm a good capitalist -- and a good socialist."

They ARE learning.  Now maybe the Kirby family can help the rest of us learn. Remember, cheap at the beginning, expensive at the end.  Prostitute yourself, and you end up in the hospital -- or the morgue.  Same for artists.

Binding, My Ass

What can the internet do? Shall we see? I once offered this language to an animation-industry artist, and after thinking a moment, she said, "They'd jump at it! No lawyers!"

So here we go.

"THIS contract shall be binding on ALL movie studios, publishers and all other middle-men who sign contracts with me. If it's between the quotes on this posting -- and you sign a contract with me after this date -- this contract is binding upon you. You are responsible to find and understand this contract in conjunction with any contract with me. This is a public blog. Hereafter:

"This is a contract binding upon all movie studios with whom I (as understood by the artist/writer/ Donna Barr, born in 1952 and Not From Earth) shall henceforth negotiate for use of my work:

If any studio shall wish to use my (see I) work in movie/s, for t-shirts and other tchatskis or internet shenanigans, send $4 million dollars to an off-shore account in my name and then go away and never bother me any more. If you wish to contact me again, every contact -- in voice, flesh, pixels or throwing one of those fuzzy green tennis balls for my dog (I'll get one) -- shall be billed at $1 million per contact.

The same goes for any publisher (you know who you are) who wants my copyright. You're lucky I don't make this retroactive."

For those of you who are getting those manga-based contracts that demand copyright, just remember this: if they can't afford to buy your copyright, they can't afford to sue you. I didn't say "Take the money and run," but you get the idea.

Hey, we didn't start this. We just want to draw and write stuff and not end up on the street when we're old.

(For those of you who are not my readers, this is supposed to be be funny.)

Chinese Bathroom Instructions

I recently received a contract that looked like Chinese bathroom instructions in English.

I was trying to rewrite it to at least make some of it make sense, when the scrambled prepositions, invented verbs and incomplete sentences made me snap: "What the hell am I doing? Don't they have lawyers to write these things? Don't they get paid for this language? If I turned in a script like this a publisher would make paper airplanes out of it."

Then I realized that this contract had never been written by anybody who spoke English. It was probably a bad translation from an anime or manga contract. Since not all Asian countries are signatories of the Berne Convention, a contract written without consideration of its requirements could land both publisher and author in a signatory country in a big chocolate-colored mess.

Look, contracts are not that hard. I've written completely binding contracts in a single page, and that included the signature blocks. For four-figure jobs. Here's the trick: the longer and sloppier the contract, the more loopholes. The shorter, dryer and more clear, the better for everybody. Better to say what IS allowed than what ISN't allowed. "Reasonable" is a good contract word. Nobody can "absolutely" or "completely" anything (any of us writing contracts with gods?). Stay out of the deep water if all you need is wading rights. Stick to plain language and keep it short.

Don't drive yourselves -- author or publisher -- crazy trying to write language the lawyers should know how to write. Do either of you get paid like a lawyer?

I didn't think so.