Jo Walton (author of the incredible, haunting novel Farthing, which you should read right now, but not if you plan on getting any sleep for the next week) has declared April 23 to be "International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day" (a reference to Howard Hendrix's now-infamous webscabs rant) to be celebrated by authors giving away a "professional quality work" on their websites. Alas, all my professional work is already available free online, except a few forthcoming works that I'll be releasing simultaneous with their print releases.
For the record, I know Howard and like him a great deal, and I also take great exception to the webscab rant. I've been exchanging private mails with him for a couple days now and I think that he's willing to reconsider the question of free online work — but I do love the idea of a big-bang day when the net gets a special infusion of great free work.
In honour of Dr Hendrix, I am declaring Monday 23rd April International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day. On this day, everyone who wants to should give away professional quality work online. It doesn't matter if it's a novel, a story or a poem, it doesn't matter if it's already been published or if it hasn't, the point is it should be disseminated online to celebrate our technopeasanthood.
Whatever you're posting should go on your own site. I'll make a post here on the day and people can post links in comments to whatever they're putting up on. If you are a member of SFWA, or SFWA qualified but not a member (like me) you get extra pixel-spattered points for doing this. If other people want to collect the links too, that would be really cool. Please disseminate this information widely
(Thanks, Billy!)
