September 2006 archive

Science Fiction Short Story: ‘Picnic’

Finally, the big publication event. I present to you: free culture, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 license, which I think is the best CC license.

Related background/promotional posts:

Part 1: Free Culture?
Part 2: Free Culture: An “Inside the Slush Pile” Exclusive!
Elsewhere: Now available at manybooks.net in a variety of formats!

Remember, this is all for fun (I hope), and: “If you don’t expect too much from me, you might not be let down.” I hope you enjoy the story.

Thanks to Gary for drawing the pictures on short notice and agreeing to release them under the same Creative Commons license as the story.

by Scott Carpenter…

Free Culture: An ‘Inside the Slush Pile’ Exclusive!

In the first installment of this series, I promised to lend my keen insight to a comparison between the old print publishing business and the new online publishing business. What qualifies me to perform this service? Well, I have limited experience in the traditional publishing industry, having garnered forty-two rejections on five short stories over a two year period, and I have a blog that’s all of two months old.

Who could possibly be more qualified to pontificate on the subject?

(Do rejected stories count towards publishing industry experience? Or is that just editorial experience? In either case, don’t worry, you will receive the benefit of my wisdom.)

Also as promised last time, and …

Metapost: So close, yet so far…

I was so close to having the next installment of the free culture publication series ready to post for you tonight, but it needs some work, and I need to go to bed and get up early for work tomorrow. Too many people know about this thing for me to call in sick on its account. :-)

Meanwhile, I have a new entry at Free Software Magazine. I’m much happier with this one over last week’s and hope you’ll check it out.

Thanks for visiting!

(And while you’re here, why not subscribe through RSS or email if you haven’t already? I’d love to proudly display my FeedBurner subscriber count, but may need more than a dozen …

Getting Images to Display in a FeedBurner Feed and Some Hasty Thoughts on Free Software

I’m trying out FeedBurner for managing my feeds and for email subscriptions. (See: New! In the right sidebar under the syndication links.) It was pretty easy to start using with the help of this WordPress FeedBurner plugin for redirecting the RSS and Atom feeds to FeedBurner. My initial impression of their service is very positive. The only problem I’ve had is that images don’t show up in the feed anymore, because I’m using relative paths and they need to be absolute. (That was most noticeable at first. I’ve since realized that internal links were broken also.)

I contacted FeedBurner support and I think Matt Shobe must have been responding to me even before I clicked the “submit” button, as if they have …

Free Culture?

I have some free culture I’d like to share with you. Written culture. A previously unpublished science fiction short story, by me. “No, thanks,” you say. “That’s the problem with the web. Any idiot can publish his adjective-laden tripe. If it was any good, someone would have paid you for it and published it in a magazine.” Ouch. The truth hurts.

But not really. I have a thick skin when it comes to literary rejection. (Or like to think I do, at least.) A few years ago, I was eager to follow the path of submitting stories to magazines and collecting rejections until I broke through. But I only finished and circulated five stories over a two year period. I didn’t mind the …

Metapost

I’m stealing from the Comics Curmudgeon, although maybe he just stole the concept from someone else in turn. He differentiates his on-topic material (skewering the funny pages) from miscellaneous housekeeping chit-chat by labeling the chit-chat as metaposts. I like it as an early warning that you’re not getting the advertised goods. It’s hard to say what the topic of my blog really is, but this post just feels like a metapost.

This is mainly to comment on past and future posts. The past is this week’s Free Software Magazine blog entry, reprinted in the previous post. The future is that I’m working …