It’s official, Catalyst is a Cerridwen Press book. The contract is in today’s mail! Yes, I’d already talked about it with my editor, but then Raelene went on vacation and my editor went on vacation so I thought it might be the end of the first week of October before it was official. I’m very happy it didn’t take that long! Yet another reason I love dealing with EC, that’s how efficient they are even when people are dealing with post-vacation backlog. The business runs on rails.

Catalyst is my backwards book; the first one I ever wrote and the last to get a contract. It probably could have had a contract sooner, but it needed major revision after I learned enough to know how to fix it and I let it sit on the back burner while I worked on other things because last year, I was revisioned out.

Not only is its publication date backwards, but I released it independently before I submitted it to raise funds for Katrina relief. (Glad I did, too; every dollar matters and people arriving at shelters were in dire straits. “Lost their shorts” is not a joke down there right now. It’s the literal truth.) I did everything with this book backwards, but I love it and I love that it’s ending up an official Cerridwen book where it can raise many more dollars, because the double whammy of Rita on top of Katrina means the money is needed more than ever. Every buck I can raise and send on with this book makes a difference. And that’s backwards, too; the problems of fictional people going to work to solve real problems for real people.

This book is not the only backward thing in our lives right now. After owning homes as single people, we looked at the latest batch of places we could afford to own now, looked at each other, and said, “What we really want is to go rent a nice, clean, new, modern, SAFE apartment.” I know, most people live in apartments when they’re single. Then they get married and have kids and buy a house. Well, now that we have kids, we don’t have time to maintain a yard and a house. And we also aren’t in a position to deal well with surprises like a new furnace or a new roof. In an apartment, those things are somebody else’s worry. So we’re taking a step backwards and we plan to be apartment residents as soon as we can sign on the dotted line. We’re incredibly happy about this decision, too.

Doing things backwards can sometimes be the only direction to follow your bliss. Don’t let conventional wisdom tell you forward is the only way. We’re living proof that you can go backwards and arrive exactly where you want to be.