Recently my wife and I were revising our wills. (Don’t worry, kids. You’re still in.) You see, we figure every twenty years or so we ought to take a look, you know, whether things have changed or not. And, of course, we got all the standard boilerplate stuff from our lawyer. And that was good.
But I’m a writer,
and–more to the point–an editor. So I know what happens when an author dies and it’s not clear who controls the author’s copyrights. Too often it’s a mess. So now it was time for me to take the advice I’ve been doling out for several years. I asked our lawyer to put a clause in our wills that designates who will inherit our intellectual property (meager as it is). So he did.
Now we can rest easy at night knowing that all our brilliant prose, heartbreaking poetry and highly imaginative, realistic, magical, narrative, postmodern, anti-realist, traditional fiction (not to mention patents, inventions and all manner of artistic works) will have a secure future. We will not have left them destitute, homeless or orphaned, but will have provided a happy home that will serve them through their full term of copyright.
