Venturing Out Into the World

Venturing Out Into the World

 This week, for the first time in over a year, we went away overnight just for fun (unlike the last time when we were running away from wild fires). Steve and I, both fully vaccinated, decided to take a two-night trip to a resort about 200 miles from our home.

Sometimes all you need is a beautiful river with nobody else around. Fortunately for us we were able to find several spots like this during our two days away.

This was also something of a rehearsal for a longer trip we are planning in a few weeks. That trip will be much more than two nights – in fact it will be nearly two months by the time we are done.

If that sounds crazy, well, it is. But sometimes you have to get a little crazy, or you’ll go insane. I think that applies to most aspects of your life, including your creative life. You have to sometimes do something larger-than-life and just see what happens.

I hope the trip will not interfere with the regular posts here on Patreon (and on the blog), but I want to tell you up front what we’re planning, just in case something interferes with my plans. Scheduled posts should appear at least twice a month, at the very least.

This trip is the long-delayed retirement celebration that we were supposed to have taken 15 months ago, when I first retired. It has evolved since then to its current epic proportions. So let me answer the five basic questions:

WHO IS “WE”?

This trip is just my husband and I, and the various family and friends we hope to visit along the way. One of the advantages of reaching retirement age is that we have friends scattered across the country.

WHEN ARE WE GOING?

Basically all of May and June. We have arranged for house sitters and set up the regular bills to run on autopilot so we can be comfortable leaving for several weeks.

HOW WILL WE GET THERE?

In the last few years – like most of you, I am sure – we have found plane travel to be a special kind of torture. Crammed into ever-smaller spaces for which we are paying higher fares, charged an extra fee for everything from a bottle of water to a carry-on bag to 3 extra inches of leg room, and subject to delays and overbooking, we looked forward to any flight with a mixture of dread and existential despair.

I suppose flying first class might relieve some of the issues but it would also increase the financial burden well beyond my retirement budget!

But now, with all of us vaccinated and caution a part of our routine, we are taking an epic road trip.

WHERE ARE WE GOING?

Our route is flexible, but the basic plan is to follow Interstate 40 from Southern California as far as Nashville and then cut south to Alabama and continue south to where our family lives. As for the return path, we’ll figure that out when the time comes. Hint: the hotter it gets, the more a northern path looks good!

WHY ARE WE GOING?

My husband’s family lives 3,000 miles away, in the southeast corner of Alabama. We do not get to see them nearly as often as we would like, due to the distance. The last year has been particularly difficult as we watched infection rates soar and recognized that we did not dare travel, nor could we risk carrying a deadly disease into the home of two 80-somethings.

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Three thousand miles each way is just the beginning. We will try to make interesting stops along the way, and I hope to be able to provide you with a travelogue as we go along. With pictures, maybe a bit of video, and perhaps an audio recording or two.

That was one of the reasons for the trip this week: to try out some of the things we are planning to do. We experimented a bit with a small audio mixer/recorder and lavalier microphones, with some success. We practiced packing the car, and figuring out exactly what can be left in the trunk and what has to come into our room each night. What computer equipment will be necessary to continue working from the road and stay in touch with our social networks – like all of you!

There is still a lot to do to be ready, and I am sure we will forget something. Probably several things.

Still, it is finally time to do something a little crazy and this is important, family is important. We are going to venture out into the world and we will try to take you along for the ride.

Here’s to adventure!

Simplify, Simplify, Simplify

Common wisdom is that retirees should consider downsizing and simplifying their lives. Unburden yourself from the possessions that require storage and display space, jettison the day job wardrobe, maybe get rid of that second vehicle that requires insurance and maintenance now that you don't have to commute.

Certainly there is some wisdom in that advice. Most of us have had to face the dismantling of a parent's estate, deciding what to do with all the things that accumulated over a lifetime, choosing what to keep and what to sell or give away, placing a value on each item.

But a creative may want to reconsider moving into a smaller dwelling.

There is a lot to be said for the luxury of enough room to actually create without restrictions, for space to store supplies and tools, for a place you can call your own and which you can dedicate to your own creative use. Enough space that your current project doesn't have to be packed away to make room for dinner, or homework, or laundry folding.

A space that is exclusively yours.

This was a fun place to sit and read, but it was a little cramped for use as an office. Still, it was a (temporary) place of my own. Thanks to Featherbed Railroad for a splendid visit a few years back!

This is not to say that you shouldn't consider a smaller dwelling. If you do beadwork, or make lace, or decorate cakes maybe your tools and materials don't take up a large amount of space. But if you love woodworking and want to create pieces of custom furniture perhaps a townhouse isn't for you. Keeping chickens is probably not compatible with a suburban development with strict covenants, and an expansive garden needs acreage, even if it's measured in fractions.

For me the single most important consideration when choosing to remain in our home of 20 years was whether it still fit the creative lifestyle we want to live. Is the space compatible with our choices?

See, our house is nearly 80 years old, and it hasn't had a lot of updating. The kitchen is marginal at best - it still has a 1940s single sink, little usable countertops, and minimal storage. We have a single bathroom which we updated several years ago; but still, one bathroom with almost no counter space.

Mid-construction with the new shop in the background. The converted garage is on the right and the house - really a post-war beach cottage - on the left. (And construction clutter everywhere!)

This house was built, I'm sure, as a vacation bungalow near the end of WWII (clue: the original plans show the area as Roosevelt-by-the-Sea), and while the structure is solid, it clearly wasn't built as a full-time family home. There simply isn't enough room for a growing post-war family.

Now the second bedroom is an office for our publishing company, and when we moved in we converted the garage to an office for my husband. I had a space in the attic-a large space, but unfinished-that was supposed to be turned into an office but it proved to be more complicated that we expected and the conversion stalled out. Eventually it proved to be too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter.

When we started talking about retirement, about where we wanted to live for the rest of our lives (yes, that's a topic for another day), we did consider moving into a house that better suited our needs. Except Steve didn't want to give up that office space, and I don't blame him.

Still, there were things we wanted. Shop space was at the top of the list, and after doing some research we came to the conclusion that creating more space made far more sense than moving, for many reasons.

The biggest reason, the one that favors a long-time residence, is that we own this house. Not us and the bank, just us. If you've been in your house for a long period you may be near that point. At the very least you may have a very favorable mortgage rate and a low payment; a potent argument for staying put.

We ended up building a 400 square foot, two-story shop a few feet from our back door. In one corner we framed in a small room, installed plenty of electrical outlets and a large window, and I had a new office space. Steve has a large shop on the ground floor and storage on the upper floor.

We actually opted for more space, not less. But we were also able to get exactly what we needed and wanted.

When we designed the building we also planned for my office space to be set up to work as a recording studio for audio. We kept it small, insulated it heavily, and put in a solid door. Now, with the addition of wall hangings to deaden the sound, we can use our new audio room. The wall hangings are configured so they can be taken down and stored easily when not in use.

Instead of downsizing we actually chose to increase our space, and more importantly to create a space that fits our needs.

Your needs and wants may vary; you might want guest rooms, or a place with no yard work, or a formal dining room for dinner parties so you can indulge your creativity by cooking for friends and family.

But whatever you want to accommodate your creativity, now is the time to consider what will allow you to create as you wish. You can choose your best space and let your creative spirit flow.

And downsizing just might not be the answer.

Retirement Redux

noun

1.    the action or fact of leaving one's job and ceasing to work.

"a man nearing retirement"

2.    the withdrawal of a jury from the courtroom to decide their verdict.

 (Thank you, Google!)

 As I said several weeks ago, the General Manager of the hotel where I worked told me I needed to look up the definition of that word because I didn’t seem to know what it actually meant.

He was right of course, because I was putting in more than 40 hours a week working on the rescue mission I’ve talked about. I was working more hours than before I “retired” and I was often in the office nights and weekends as I tackled the backlog of work.

A couple months ago I noted that I had returned to working from home, letting the new boss assume his place in the Big Chair. It was the right decision. He needed to be in charge, and no matter how much I agreed with that there was still the “too many chiefs” problem whether I intended it or not.

There was a period of transition when I returned to my home office, and that worked fine for a few weeks, but eventually we reached a point where changes needed to be made (this is a recurring theme, isn’t it?), the jury returned with their verdict and I am now firmly, officially, and completely retired.

There's still only one spot at the top, and I had to make room for the new boss.

In some ways this change was actually more difficult that my original decision to retire. We didn’t plan it, didn’t spend months building up to it, didn’t arrange our lives to accommodate the change. It was abrupt, even a bit unexpected – I had mentally set myself a deadline about a month later and the sudden change was unsettling.

This is, I think, a problem that many other people may be facing in the aftermath of the past year. Jobs – careers – that were an anchor for our lives and our definitions of ourselves have been ripped from the seabed and we are adrift in a storm.

In the past retirement was something you planned for. You prepared your finances, readied your residence, alerted your employer, discussed plans with your family, and arranged to live your post-retirement life in the best way possible.

In short, you anticipated your retirement.

Like the sunset, retirement appears on the horizon and we can anticipate its arrival.

But in the last year, in the face of a pandemic that shut down workplaces and curtailed activities, jobs changed dramatically. Some jobs disappeared and won’t return.

Some people will find other jobs, some will strike out on their own, some will enter the “gig economy” as a way to supplement savings or unemployment, and some will choose to retire.

Or they will have retirement forced upon them.

I kind of feel like I am – strangely – in that last category. The change was not completely unexpected, I had planned to leave in another month or so, but the abrupt decision was still unsettling – and that was for someone who wanted to be retired and planned to be retired.

I can only imagine how distressing it could be for someone who was unprepared for that disruption, especially when piled on top of an already-tumultuous life upended by a global health crisis.

I don’t have a magic formula for making this better. I can’t pretend that I do. I have a raft of my own anxieties, and demons that creep out in the middle of the night and taunt me. I think most of us do.

But what I can say is that after the initial shock to the system I started re-adjusting and am beginning to relax into my new status. For me, because I was already looking ahead, I expect the transition will be faster than for others.

I know it won’t happen all at once, but it will happen. Just as we will find a new status quo as the pandemic threat lessens. It won’t be “normal” in any way we have defined it in the past, but it will be a new equilibrium point and we will find our balance.

For those of you who are facing one of these sudden and unexpected changes I offer my sympathy and sincere best wishes that you will find the new balance point for your life. I hope the change allows you to re-define yourself for yourself, and to find the creativity that brings you joy.

Your point of balance will be different from mine, and from that of everyone else. But it will be yours, it will be in balance. and I hope it will bring you peace and joy.

One thing that is helping me is planning the long-delayed road trip that was supposed to happen as soon as I retired. (Could I have chosen a WORSE date than 2/15/20? Probably not!)

I will do my best to keep everything running smoothly here, but we expect to be on the road for five or six weeks, making an overdue visit to family on the other side of the country. We still don’t want to fly, so we will be driving and with luck we will have adventures along that we can share with you. We hope that those adventures do not include connectivity issues, but there are no guarantees. I hope you will all bear with us if there are scheduling issues along the way.

Also, stay tuned here for some new features. We are experimenting with audio broadcasts, and I am getting ready to assemble ebook and print versions of the first fifty columns, which will be available later this year.

Just What the Doctor Ordered

Did you ever call in sick at your day job? I certainly did, including once from the back of an ambulance (but that's another story). We've all had days when we simply could not function, when our bodies refused to cooperate with our work schedule, or we were contagious and didn't want to risk taking out our entire workplace. (I have been known to start conversations with my doctor by saying, "I don't want to be Patient Zero.")

But how do you determine when to "call in" on your creative pursuits? How do you take a day off when your whole life is days off?

This tram went past my hospital-room window. Waiting until I had to be here was not a good choice!

It feels like we are back to the highly-motivated individuals here, and perhaps we are.

Maybe you were the kind of employee that listened to your body and responded appropriately; you took time when you needed it and got the care you required to return to the task at full strength. But from the studies I see it sounds like most of us were not. More and more the workplace values soldiering on in spite of physical or medical issues. We glorify the person who is back at their workstation mere days after major surgery, we praise the ones who get to the end of the year with perfect attendance, we reward those who do not use sick days. Secretly some of us feel like things will fall apart if we are not at work. (I hate to break it to you, but that really isn't likely. Much as we want to believe we are indispensable, it just isn't so.)

To be honest, it feels like we have elevated the work ethic, the perfect attendance, above the health and well-being of the employees. And each and every one of us has internalized those values to the point where we consider calling in sick as a sign of weakness, of laziness, of not caring about our jobs.

How could I possibly take a day off when my schedule looks like this??

We have allowed that attitude to rule us for all our working lives, and it has spilled over into our private lives as well.

Don't think so? Take a look at any national ad campaign for over-the-counter medications. Cough syrup, cold or flu medicine, pain relievers, and so on. Do they say "Take two tablets and go to bed"? No! Take two of our miracle tablets and you can keep going, do your job, work through it.

Got a nasty head cold? Take this drug and you can go to the office and power through a pile of paperwork like the superhero you are. Flu? Our non-drowsy formula will let you continue operating heavy machinery. Mom has a headache? Take two tablets and go cook dinner.

It spills over into our non-work, non-chore lives as well. Too tired for a night on the town? Forget about a quiet evening in and an early bedtime, there's a pill for that. Allergies making you miserable? Take our gelcaps and get out there and mow the lawn.

There are times medications are appropriate. Allergy medicine allows you to function outdoors during high pollen counts, even if all you do is loll in a hammock with a good book. It allows you to work in the garden, if that is where your creative passion lies.

Other medications help you to continue functioning when there is something you absolutely must do (Hint: That isn't going to work. Or mowing the lawn).

It's the underlying message, "Work, even if you're sick, or in pain" that needs to go.

So how many times have you thought about your creative pursuit and said to yourself, "I need to" or "I should"? At that moment you have just moved your beloved creative outlet to a chore, to something you have to do.

You have taken away the option of a sick day.

You are your own boss now, so don't be like this guy!

Sick days are not an indulgence. Especially, much as we hate to admit it, as we get older. Our bodies are aging and no matter how hard we fight it with diet and exercise and proper medical care, no matter how many miles we log on the treadmill or the running track, we cannot perform the same way we did at 25.

You've heard the saying "It's not the years, it's the mileage"? So true. But routine maintenance is important, too.

We all know what happens if you ignore a small leak in a pipe. It becomes a big leak, maybe even a rupture that floods the bathroom and requires major plumbing work. Your body is the same way. Ignore a minor problem, force yourself to continue to work through the pain, and eventually it's going to become a major issue.

We all know what will happen if we let this go, so why would you pay attention to a leaky faucet but not your own body?

Over the years I based my creative sick days on the measure of whether I would have called in to the day job. If I'd call off the day job, then I was justified in taking a sick day from my creative pursuit. Even that was putting a work frame around my creativity - but note that I was under contract, legally obligated to produce a book within a specified time, so in that sense it was also a job.

I carried that mindset into retirement, essentially turning writing into a job. If I wanted a day off I felt I had to justify it, and being sick - especially when there weren't co-workers to infect - wasn't enough justification. Even in retirement I was still glorifying perfect attendance.

We all need to stop making perfect attendance a badge of honor. We need instead to give ourselves the care we need, and sometimes that care is simply a sick day. A day of rest.

So many times the doctor's advice is to rest, get plenty of fluids, and take a couple aspirin (or your OTC pain med of choice). Usually we take the aspirin, maybe even up our fluid intake, and call it good.

But do we, do you, actually rest? Do you crawl back in bed after breakfast and take a nap instead of washing the dishes and sweeping the floor? Lay on the sofa with your favorite blanket (admit it, we all have one) and snooze through a familiar movie rather than spending a couple hours in your workshop? Go back to bed hours before your usual bedtime instead of stretching just one more canvas?

I'm guessing that most of us answered no, even though rest was exactly what the doctor ordered.

It's time to change all that. There's no reward for powering through and there never really was - except perhaps an even worse illness - but there's a great deal to be gained from listening to our bodies and taking care of them, allowing them to rest.

Take care of yourself.

Follow the doctor's orders.

And take a sick day once in a while.

Change Is In the Air

Change is usually a constant in all our lives, though for more than a year we have isolated ourselves at home, stopped going anywhere, and put our entire lives “on hold” as we waited for something.

This is us, not going anywhere. This is everyone not going anywhere, for more than a year.

Yes, the initial lockdown, the self-quarantine, the shutdowns, upended our routines. Our lives changed dramatically in a matter of days or weeks. However, that initial disruption quickly morphed into something else: a mind-numbing routine that didn’t change. For many creative people that routine, that isolation and lack of contact with the world, has stagnated our creativity.

I mentioned this a couple months ago, and since then I have heard from many creative friends that they are struggling with the effort to create anything.

This is more than not filling the well. We have found ways to do that without taking risks.

It’s also more than lacking contact with other creatives. We’ve found ways around that too, with video chats and Zoom calls and group messaging.

It’s a feeling of isolation that goes beyond all of these, a feeling of being isolated from our own creativity, being unable to reach that well of inspiration and creation that feeds us on an emotional and spiritual level.

Isolation. Separation. There is a barrier keeping us from our creative lives.

I don’t have an answer for this soul-deep malaise. I don’t even know if there is an answer, except to hold on just a little longer.

Because a change is coming. Things are getting better.

There is a ray of hope on the horizon, and it is growing with every passing day.

There is a light coming toward us. It's hope, lighting the way for us if we can just hold on a little longer, not an oncoming train!

I honestly have been afraid to hope for a long time. I couldn’t look ahead because the prospects were bleak, and I didn’t know how long I would have to hold myself together. I could make it to tomorrow, or next week.

But another month, or six months? That took more resilience, and I wasn’t sure I had it. It was safer not to look, not to plan, so that the enormity of what faced us didn’t overwhelm me.

Not all of that has changed, but some things have, and I am beginning to believe again.

For the first time in months I am starting to trust the future again.

The biggest change for me, as it has been for so many of us, is the availability of a vaccine. And not just one, but three vaccines.

This is what hope looks like!

The distribution has been frustrating for many of us. No appointments, long waits, rules that are subject to change, limited supplies – there’s a long list of irritants and complications. But for the most part those issues are getting ironed out as time goes on and we gain experience with the requirements of the system.

It has been particularly stressful for me because Oregon has mandated some strict age guidelines. My husband has several underlying conditions, but age is not one of them and as a result he has not been eligible to receive a vaccine in our state (and we certainly weren’t going to travel anywhere!). I felt like a creep for wanting him to go ahead of other people – people who were just as deserving, whose families were just as concerned for them – but there have been moments when I couldn’t prevent myself from feeling angry, fearful, and helpless.

I wish I could say I was better than that, but I’m not. (Remember, when I started this I promised “warts and all.” This is a big wart.)

However, we have been fortunate. Here in Oregon we have several jurisdictions which are not subject to the state mandate. They’re called tribal lands, and they are their own jurisdiction, with their own rules, and their health clinics have opened registration to the public.

How and why they are able to do this I can only speculate. But whatever the reasons it means that my under-65 husband was able to get a vaccination just over a week ago, only a couple weeks after I got my first shot.

The feeling of relief in our household has been palpable. It has given me reason to hope that we can reclaim our lives.

We can see the light, and we know it's coming!

We are still cautious, and will remain so. Masks will remain a fact of life for months – or years – to come, at least until the CDC changes their recommendation. If that never changes, we can live with that; because we will live, and that’s the bottom line.

We do intend to travel, cautiously and with a great deal of advance planning. We do intend to see our families as soon as it is safe to do so. We do intend to question the inoculation status of anyone with whom we interact – even though we are protected we don’t want to contribute to anyone else catching this horrid virus.

Change is coming, and I feel that it will be for the good. It will allow all of us to reclaim our lives in some fashion. We may never go back to the way things were, but we will find a new way to live.

Because change is constant, and will be constant in our lives.

Controlling Your Creations

No, this isn't about Frankenstein trying to control his monster, or robot creations run amok - though both of those can be interesting stories - but about the control of your intellectual creations, the products of your own creativity. After recommending the Copyright Handbook and other Nolo Press publications I thought this might be a companion piece for the discussion of intellectual property. We will be coming back to this subject in the future, I'm sure, but here's this week's installment.

One of the many Nolo Press publications that can help you learn about intellectual property and the laws that govern it.

At first blush you may not think this column applies to you, and that is always possible with every column. That's one of the reasons for the variety of content presented: If today's topic doesn't interest you or apply to the way you are expressing your creativity, maybe next week's recommended reading will, or you'll find your creative community through the Discord channel via Patreon, or you'll learn something from another reader's comment.

In another column I talked about the hard conversations we have to have with our loved ones, and I have mentioned intellectual property (IP) a time or two. IP is a huge subject. It has enough complexities to fill several courses in law school, and supports entire legal practices with its nuances. Anything written here is strictly to familiarize you with the concept; for anything else I strongly advise you consult an expert, which I decidedly am not (nor do I claim to be).

This guy may think he's an expert, but even his crystal ball isn't going to give you the information you need to make good decisions.

The most basic definition of intellectual property is "a work or invention that is the result of creativity ..." (thanks, Google!). At the most basic level IP simply means if you create something-a song, a story, an original painting, a needlework design-it belongs to you and you control how it gets used.

From there it gets complicated (REALLY complicated). If you want to maintain some control over your creations, you will need to learn a bit about IP, you may want to get some professional advice, and you will have to have one of those hard conversations with your heirs about what to do with the property after you're gone.

Very simply, everything you create is a piece of property that will be passed on to your heirs. Your creations may have sentimental value, they may have commercial value, or some combination of the two. For instance, I have an antique china hutch that was created by my great-grandmother's father as a wedding gift to her and her new husband, before the turn of the last century. I have no idea what its value is as an antique, but it's sentimental value is enormous.

Who knows what you might have locked away? More to the point, who should know?

Whatever their value, those properties need to be included in your estate. Don't assume that "somebody" will take care of them. If your creations have commercial value they will need to managed and marketed in order to maximize their value to your estate, and that will take some work and some knowledge.

Look at things like the Elvis Presley estate. Mismanagement had reduced the value before Presley's death, yet his heirs are some of the richest people in the country because they managed his estate properly.

Michael Jackson? His heirs fought each other in court and in public, and the battle continued for more than 10 years and cost thousands – or millions - of dollars.

I know someone who was heir to a best-selling author's estate, but management of the creative property was placed with someone else who did not handle it properly and the value dropped to almost zero.

I recommended this book a few weeks back. It has some horror stories about what happens when intellectual property is mishandled.

You may not think your paintings or your stories or your songs are worth much, and maybe they aren't. But whether they are or they aren't you need to have a hard conversation with your family, your heirs, to make sure that "somebody" is ready to take responsibility for them.

Or not.

You can, quite honestly, abandon your creations, assume they will not live on after you're gone. You can decide they won't have continued value and simply ignore the entire topic. Who cares what happens to them once their creator is no longer around?

You could just choose to blow it all to smithereens, though I don't advocate that. If that's your choice, you may need this!

That is a perfectly valid decision. But who among us hasn't had that fantasy, just once, that something we create will catch on with the public, that our song will hit the pop charts, or our book will become a best-seller, or our painting will make it to the auction block at Sotheby's?

If you haven't paid any attention, if you haven't learned at least a little bit about intellectual property, that moment could come at any time and you (or your heirs) will watch your creation used to sell soft drinks without anyone being paid for that use.

In addition, you need to educate yourself about the basic business model of your chosen creative endeavor - How do galleries function when they display your sculpture or pottery or paintings for sale? What are the basic parts of a publishing contract? How are needlework or cabinetry patterns distributed? - and that information needs to be passed along to whoever takes responsibility for your IP when you can no longer do it.

In that I am fortunate. My son trained as a lawyer. I didn't have to explain to him what intellectual property is, but we have had several long discussions about how to handle the rights to my books and stories, about how publishing works, and how to generate income for him and his sister.

You may find all of this hard to believe, and as I said you can choose to ignore the possibilities. Like my friend and their child who cannot bring themselves to have this discussion you may find this conversation too uncomfortable to even consider, because you don't believe a financially rewarding outcome is even possible. That is your choice.

On the other hand, I seriously doubt that Edgar Rice Burroughs could have foreseen his character, John Carter of Mars, would be the title character of a movie made 100 years after Carter's first fictional appearance in the pulp magazine The All-Story.

This issue of The All-Story from 1912 contained an installment of Burroughs' "Under the Moon of Mars." After several mergers and name changes The All-Story merged with The Argosy in 1920.

You never know.

Recommended Reading: Nolo Press

Recommended Reading

Nolo Press

Copyright Series

Nolo Press (a subsidiary of MH Sub I, LLC) publishes do-it-yourself legal guides. According to the company website, “Our mission is to help consumers and small businesses find answers to their everyday legal and business questions.”

In 2011 they combined with Divorcenet.com and AllLaw.com to form the Nolo Network. Nolo itself has been publishing since 1971, and “The Copyright Handbook: What Every Writer Needs To Know” is now in its 14th edition.

But what if you’re not a writer? They also publish books about music, trademarks, patents, and offer other information, referrals, and miscellaneous advice on their site.

I am, naturally, most interested in copyright. I have a copy of the Copyright Handbook and have read some parts of it several times. The laws governing intellectual property (hereafter abbreviated as IP) are extensive and complex, and it takes time and study to understand them – time and study that some lawyers have invested to make themselves experts.

This book is an invaluable resource for writers, as well as other creatives who are concerned with copyrights.

This book won’t make you an expert at that level, but it will give you a good basic education in IP, and it will help you see where your individual situation may spawn questions. It makes a solid basis for a layman’s understanding of the law, and it can provide you with enough information to handle a lot of your own basic needs.

Disclaimer: I certainly don’t advocate going the do-it-yourself route for all your legal needs!

But even if you intend to use an attorney for IP matters – and there are definitely circumstances where you should – knowing the basics of IP law is a good thing. For instance, you can gain an understanding of the terminology your attorney might use for a lot less than paying them by the hour to explain what it means. Additionally, attorneys specialize and your attorney - the one who handled a divorce, or adoption, or incorporating your small business – may know a lot about family matters, or business requirements in your state, but not be well-versed in federal IP law.

Yes, IP law is federal, not state or local, jurisdiction. In fact, the Founding Fathers considered ownership and control of intellectual property so important that they included it in the Constitution. Article I Section 8 - Clause 8 – Patent and Copyright Clause of the Constitution. [The Congress shall have power] “To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.”

You may have no desire to handle your own legal affairs as they relate to your intellectual property – and remember that your creations are your legal intellectual property – but knowledge is power.

Knowing your rights, knowing what you can and can’t do with your work, is something every creator should aspire to, and this is a topic we will come back to later, probably several times, from different angles.

It is something we all need to deal with at some level, with or without expert assistance.

But in the meantime, I highly recommend that you read “The Copyright Handbook,” or another of the Nolo Press publications that relates to your specific creations. Gain a basic understanding of what constitutes IP and how it can be bought and sold, licensed, divided, and inherited.

  https://www.nolo.com/

It's All Been Done

A few days ago my husband read me something he found online; the assertion that "The Fugitive" is just another version of "Les Miserables."

I hadn't through about it that way before, but as soon as he said it I said "Of course."

That idea, and my instantaneous response, reminded me of the notion that there is really nothing new under the sun. No story that hasn't been told many times through music, art, words, or dance.

It's a problem for every creative person, the feeling that whatever they do, whatever they create, someone else has already done it.

Create giant billiard balls? It's been done. We spotted these on a road trip through the Nevada desert. I don't know what these were originally, but I think you'll need a discarded power pole as a cue stick!

This may feel like more of a stumbling block for those of us who are of "a certain age," because we have had time to absorb so much more of classical and popular culture, and thus are more likely to feel that we've seen it all before. While a 20-something may discover superheroes through movies and television, us old folks found them in the pages of ten-cent four-color comic books on spinner racks in the drug store. To us they are characters and stories that have been around forever, but to that younger person they're new and exciting.

Some of us read Tolkien when his were just about the only fantasy novels available and his tales of elves and dwarves and orcs and ents felt new and exotic. Later generations discovered fantasy stories from other authors, or from television and movies. Yet even Tolkien’s stories of epic struggles between the forces of good and evil had been done before. He just found his own way to tell them.

One Ring To Rule Them All. But Tolkien wasn't the first to write epic stories of the battle between good and evil. And he wouldn't be the last.

Mankind has been cooking since the discovery of fire. We occasionally find new ways to prepare food, or new combinations of ingredients, but it's still the same basic concept.

The same goes for carpentry. Designs may differ somewhat, but when it comes down to it there are only so many ways you can construct a place to sit, or a chest to store your valuables.

I say all of this not to discourage or depress you, but to make you realize that even though it's all been done, it hasn't been done by you.

And that is what is important.

You.

You are an individual.

You have a unique combination of genetics and experience that make you a singular phenomenon is the history of the universe.

There may be people who look like you, through genetics or just happenstance. There will be people who share your outlook, your ideas and ideals. But no one else has amassed the exact same combination of nature and nurture that produced you.

Flour. Water. Yeast. The same basic ingredients, yet each one is different, depending on the baker.

I had just this discussion with a friend at work just a couple days ago. She was lamenting her 14-year-old daughter's self-inflicted quarantine haircut, hidden beneath her hoodie while the family celebrated her older brother casting his very first ballot. The contrast was not lost on the mother. The son, their firstborn, was a natural athlete and an all-around good kid. The daughter is also a good kid, and extremely bright and accomplished. But even with the same parents, the same loving and industrious home, and the same academic and athletic accomplishments, she marches to her own beat.

And cuts her own hair.

My response was that it's just hair. It will grow back, and she needed to feel like her own person, even if no one sees it but her family. Besides, I can't say too much when my own daughter's hair is the color of cotton candy! (Just for the record, it's really cute!)

The point is, this son and daughter had similar nature and nurture, but they are different people, and the daughter knows it.

If we were to give each of these two a set of parameters and ask them to tell a story-through music, dance, dramatic presentation, food, whatever medium they wanted-each story would be unique. They likely wouldn't even choose the same form of expression.

They are individuals.

The same goes for all of us. Here's another example, even closer to home for me.

Many years ago my husband and I were on the freeway behind a James River Paper truck. Their logo at the time was a stylized JR that we decided looked like a cactus wearing a seatbelt. That led to a conversation about why the cactus was wearing a seatbelt, and we each had our own answer. Fast forward a few weeks and we had each written a story about the cactus in a seatbelt.

The James River logo that inspired the cactus stories. The logo was retired several years ago (making it hard to find a good example of the logo) but I STILL think it looks like a cactus wearing a seatbelt. Don't you?

Mine was a bittersweet women's fiction story about a woman starting over after the death of her fiancé, taking the cactus with her to her new home. His was about two extraterrestrial frat brothers on spring break, called "The Cactus, the Coyote, and the Lost Planet Joyride." Why was the cactus driving the stolen Cadillac? Because the coyote didn't have hands, of course. And I will bet if I asked you to tell me why the cactus was wearing the seatbelt you would have a completely different story.

Harlequin built an entire publishing empire on publishing romance novels. The basic plot of every story is boy meets girl, complications ensue, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back again, they live happily ever after. A quick search turns up statistics from 2002, when they published over 1,100 versions of that story, had revenue of more than half a billion (with a B) dollars, and other publishers released almost that many more.

Why? Because those stories-despite adhering to the basic structure-were all different. They were written by different people with different voices and points of view.

Whenever we start to feel discouraged, to think we can't come up with anything original, to believe that in order to be creative we have to do something that has never been done before, we need to remember this.

It might have been done before, maybe by dozens, or hundreds, of people.  But there is one big difference.

It hasn't been done by you.

Tell Me What You Need

When I posted a recent Dispatch (Who Loves Ya', Baby?) I was reminded of something I had just read and thought it related to the subject at hand.

The book is The Bridesmaids: Grace Kelly, Princess of Monaco, and Six Intimate Friends, bu Judith Balaban Quine. Published more than 30 years ago, the book explores the lives and friendships of the six women who stood with Princess Grace on her wedding day, a fairy-tale day that many of us remember from our childhood. These women grew up in the 1930s and 40s, married in the 50s, and raised the generation that came to be known as The Baby Boom.

This book was a glimpse into a world I knew existed but where I had never lived.

It's an interesting read, a glimpse at a tiny sliver of society that many of us never knew. They were children of privilege, possibly the last generation to know both privilege and privacy. The press frenzy surrounding the marriage of Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier of Monaco was a precursor of the paparazzi and the 24-hour celebrity news cycle in which we now live.

I confess to several eye-rolling moments as I read about the difficulties these women went through. I don't mean to trivialize their problems, but the plain fact is that whatever they endured, they did it in apartments in New York City, hillside homes in Hollywood, and far-flung locations around the globe. Financial hardships meant their children went to public school.

As I said, a world most of us never knew.

But late in the book as she describes yet another broken marriage, Quine says, "To be fair, he [the husband] was victimized by what most men of our generation suffered from-the middle-aged delayed take. Most of us, as wives, had waited so long to identify the things that bothered us in our marriages that by the time we did decide to address them, they appeared like a range of unscalable precipices. Astonished to find themselves suddenly cast as villains in our lives, most of our men did not know how to relinquish the role. They were just doing what had been all right for years, and now suddenly it was all wrong." (pp 338-9)

Sometimes it can feel like climbing a tall peak in a tank top and flip flops, but figuring out what you need is worth the effort.

This is the generation of women, and men, who raised us Boomers. We learned our gender roles, our family roles, our societal roles, from them. Often we carried those roles, those definitions of our place in society and in our own intimate relationships, into adulthood.

We carried these roles into our creative lives.

When I spoke of honesty in discussing what we need as creatives, this is the kind of deeply-ingrained attitude we are fighting in having that difficult and painful conversation; admitting what we truly need and asking for it. We have been raised to believe that asking for what we need in that way is selfish, that it somehow cheats our families of what they need. This isn’t a gender issue, just as the husbands in Quine’s book were blindsided by these changes, so are partners of all types when we finally admit what we need.

Yeah, kind of like this. When you find you're paddling in opposite directions you need to stop and figure out where you want to go. Together.

And by delaying that discussion it comes as an unpleasant and often unwelcome surprise to our partners.

Defeating those attitudes for all our intimate relationships has been one of the biggest challenges for the Baby Boom generation. We were raised in the 50s with the same traditional roles as our parents-the roles Quine talks about in her book-and ran headlong into the civil rights movement, the sexual revolution, and women's liberation. These upheavals of the second half of the century questioned every attitude we were raised with, and presented us with a whole new worldview. But old habits die hard and those attitudes were planted early and buried deep.

They are attitudes my husband and I have fought our entire marriage.

Before I go any farther, I want to put this right up front. I absolutely won the in-law sweepstakes, in every way. Even when they didn't understand what we were doing, my husband's parents and his brother have been nothing but loving and supportive, and I feel immensely privileged to have become a part of such an amazing family. My apologies to those of you who had to settle for second-best!

My husband and I are not what those post-war parents envisioned as a traditional couple. When we married I was older, divorced, had a couple half-grown kids, and a large extended family. Steve was nine years younger, never married, and the much-loved older son of a small family. His father's job had moved them around the country many times as he grew up, bonding them into a small, tight-knit unit. His brother was his best friend in those years, and his extended family was often distant.

It took effort and honesty for our families to see what we were doing. To understand just how important it was for me to support Steve's desire to "tell stories," and to continue that support even when he didn't become a mega-best-seller and support me in the style to which I would have liked to become accustomed. That support was cemented early on when we had a frank discussion of what we wanted for life, and his simple answer was “I want to tell stories” with no limitations on what form that story-telling might take. His vision, so clear and inclusive gave me the determination to make his dream a reality.

With the perspective of our 37 years together (I am still boggled by that number!) I now realize that that support may well have also been driven in part by my own creative spirit. I somehow recognized the importance of his deep need to create, maybe even saw it reflected in my own hidden needs, and embraced the opportunity to support and encourage his creative endeavors.

I think that was reflected in how I described our relationship. Early on I chose to reject the rather pejorative term "working wife." Instead I called myself a "patron of the arts." It was a small thing, and perhaps rather silly, but it reinforced my respect for and appreciation of what he was doing. It recognized that there was value in his work, and it laid the foundation for him to value my creativity.

DaVinci created this portrait of Isabella d'Etre, one of his patrons. I have a tiny pencil sketch my husband made of me one day while he was waiting for me to get off work. I treasure that drawing, and the connection I feel each time I look at it.

Marrying another writer – even though it took me two tries to figure it out – was one of the best things that ever happened to me. Marrying someone with the generosity of spirit and the willingness to support my creative dreams was the greatest good fortune imaginable.

But that good fortune was more than luck, it was also the result of some brutally honest, and sometimes difficult, conversations. It was the result of each of us being able to ask for what we wanted and needed, and having a partner who was willing to accept and support those dreams.

I wish each of you the courage to have those conversations, and a partner who will share your dreams and help you get what you need to achieve them.

The Smartest Guy In the Room

You better sit down, we need to talk. There is a problem here and it might be a bit embarrassing for all us grown-ups to admit.

See, for years now (maybe even decades) we have been the experts. We've been that person, the one that knows where everything is, how to work around the usual problems, how to get stuff done. In short, we've been the smartest guy in the room.

The people here really are the smartest guys in the room!

And we like that.

We like knowing what we're doing. We like knowing what to do and how to do it. We like ('fess up, we do) the accolades and atta-boys that come from doing a job and doing it well. We like the egoboo that comes from knowing that we did a good job.

Sure pride is a "sin," but I would argue that false pride is the real sin, along with the tendency to discount or downplay our own accomplishments. I mean, how many times have you told someone they did an exceptional job and had them shrug off the acknowledgement?

(While I'm at it, do you realize what you do with that behavior? You tell the person giving the compliment that their opinion of you and your work isn't important. That it doesn't matter. Stop that! Learn to say thank you, acknowledge the compliment as well-intentioned, and move on. Yes, I am really bad at this. Yes, I am trying to improve.)

So here's the problem with all of this. We are trying something new. We are devoting time and energy and resources to it, and we are investing something of ourselves is creating our art, whatever it is.

We are always going to make mistakes, sometimes big ones. I decided I should be ready with a really big eraser!

We are newbies, and we are not going to be the smartest guy in the room.

This can be a tough pill to swallow. We are used to being accomplished and successful; we aren't used to failing. Oh sure, we had some failures along the way, but generally by the time we reach retirement we have figured out how to be successful is some way. We may not reach the heights we dreamed of when we were younger - I was going to be the first woman on the Supreme Court when I was fifteen, but the friend who promised to appoint me never got elected, and I never went to law school - but we have had successes and we have accomplished things along the way.

But now we are faced with that scary possibility - failure. Or at least not being the best at what we want to do. It's a daunting thought, and it is a very real possibility.

How can I be so sure about this? Personal experience. I've been writing for publication for more than twenty years; my first professional story was published in July, 1998. I was proud of that story, and of the dozen-plus novels and scores of short stories and articles that followed. Were they as great as I thought they were at the time?

This was my very first professional publication. Hard to believe it was nearly 23 years ago. I'm still happy with the story, and thrilled it got selected for publication. Is it perfect? Not even!

Oh. My. God. No. I blush at some of the things I wrote that people paid for. They were good enough to publish, but now I know they could have been better. I produced professional-quality books and stories and editors paid me money for them. But deep in my heart I knew I wasn't the best; I was good, but I wasn't the smartest guy in the room, not by a long shot, and I might never be.

Does that mean I shouldn't try? If I can't be the best, why waste my time? Absolutely not, unless being the best is the only reason you're doing this in the first place. But if it isn't, if the doing is as important (or more important) as the succeeding, then you should absolutely do the thing you want to do.

So what if your first cabinet has an off-kilter door? The next one will be better, and you had fun learning how to put that door on in the first place. Your quilt has uneven stitches and the colors didn't combine exactly as you expected? It will still be comforting on a cold night, and you'll come closer to your vision on the next one. Story took a left turn five pages in and ended up somewhere you didn't expect? It happens. Take pleasure in the writing and enjoy the surprise of where you ended up. The piece of pottery that was meant to be a bowl got lop-sided? Pinch a spout in the side, turn it into a pitcher, and make a bowl the next time.

It has been a long time since I played in wet clay, but looking at photos of potters at work reminds me just how much fun I had doing it. Maybe I should go see if there's a studio around where I could do some work.

Remember what I said about joy? Find the joy of discovering new ways to make your art, revel in learning, experimenting, doing. When making brings you pleasure and enjoyment you don't have to be the smartest guy in the room.

Just be the happiest.