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 A previously unpublished science fiction short story, by me.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 rejections; they were just part of the job. I think a bigger problem was that I didn’t enjoy writing fiction enough to keep toiling away at it.

One of the stories received some encouraging responses, and that’s the one I’ll publish right here on movingtofreedom.org. It will be a world premiere event. It’ll even be on-topic for this blog, with software licensing and patents driving the story. (To the extent that it is driven.)

Along the way to the big premiere, let’s look at traditional publishing, where it was generally necessary to get past an editor gatekeeper, and this new-fangled Internet where anyone can publish with no filtering whatsoever. I think I’m a good person to demonstrate the unseemliness of the new way. I failed at the traditional route and now am just dumping my work on the truck… I mean, adding it to the already overflowing series of tubes that make up the Internet. Is it going to be enough to make the tubes finally burst, or will it simply cause some minor blockage, delaying Senator Stevens’s email by a few days?

As a final bit of advance promotion and publicity, I was thinking I’d share the rejections of the story in advance of the publication. How can you pass up drama (or self-inflicted humiliation) like that? Stay tuned!