Myth, the Universe, and Everything

I've been meaning to participate in International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day since it started in 2007, and today, I am finally joining the ranks of the Technopeasant Wretches. I've uploaded a story, called "Autumn Leaves," that was originally part of my creative writing thesis and edited some since then (though it could probably use another go or two) to my site.

In conjunction with both today's and yesterday's holiday (happy Earth Day!), I think it's kind of nifty how much e-books are making the news. The Wall Street Journal ran an interesting article on how e-books may change the way we read (and are already changing the way that e-readers purchase books). PW reported on the reception of e-books at the London Book Fair, explaining the results of a study on digital text books. It's a good week to be an e-reader. Celebrate!

Earlier today I commented on sartorias's recent post about keeping old books. I'm not particularly sentimental about my books (though the ones that are signed--whether by my children's librarian growing up from books I won during summer reading or by the authors--are certainly special). When a book gets old, I replace it. Nearly five years of working at bookstores trained me to think that old books, beat-up shouldn't be read. (In some cases, this is for their own protection; we recently replaced an old copy of Edith Hamilton's Mythology that was falling apart at the spine. It's still on the shelf, but we have a shiny new copy to refer to without having to worry about losing pages.)

On the other hand, I love physical books. I love how they look on the shelf. I loved seeing my first novel in print, feeling its weight, having a friend heft it and then ask if there were pictures. (Thanks to the lovely and talented Lindsay Archer, I could say yes. He didn't believe me, and I had to flip through to show him the insets.) And, as Giles once said on Buffy, books smell. I recently got a new dictionary because it was required for a copyediting assignment I'm working on. Possibly the most fun I've had in this assignment is opening up the dictionary and flipping through the pages, having that new-book-smell of paper and book glue waft up as I found the answers to my questions (and got distracted by words like "emissary," which I didn't realize could mean not only messenger, but secret agent).

I love content posted online, but find that I read comics better online than prose. I've only ever made it through one e-book without printing it. (This was a novel by the aforementioned sartorias, who didn't say it was a novel when she posted it on Pixel-stained Technopeasant Wretch Day, so I was fooled into thinking it was a short story. By the time I realized, it was too late, and I'd been utterly sucked in. Given how much I enjoyed it, I'm not complaining.) At this point, however, I think I read maybe fifteen web comics, most of them cohorts on DrunkDuck whose authors or artists have found us over at Cowboys and Aliens. As much as I enjoy the serial nature of the stories... it'd be nice to sit down with them away from the screen. Which I suppose explains Rich Burlew's success with Order of the Stick in print: geeks like me like how books smell.

I'd been seeing a lot of people posting work online as part of the Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Wretch movement, and had no idea what spurred this on. (If I had something I wasn't still planning to submit laying about, I would have posted it as well--though I don't currently have a website to call my own where it would be convenient to post it. Also, the vast majority of my short stories hover around the 7500 word mark, making them, in my mind, too long to read in one computer sitting. Of course, I've been dedicating spare moments online to reading the novel or novella Sherwood Smith [sartorias] posted, so I suppose if people love your work enough they'll sit for the duration.)

At any rate, thanks to Brandon Sanderson (mistborn), I now know where the term originated! Apparently the current/soon-to-be-former VP of the SFWA Howard V. Hendrix called authors who post their work for free online "webscabs" and coined the phrase Pixel-stained Technopeasant Wretch. The large number of free fiction postings was in response to this. Here's the original SFWA post, if you're further interested.