Pixel-stained Technopeasant gives away free story, destroys market for SF erotica, news at 11:00.

A few weeks ago, Howard Hendrix, the vice president of the Science Fiction Writers Association, wrote a bizzare harangue against some members of the SF writing community. Officially, he was declining to run for president, since it's election time within the organization, but his letter contained something else entirely. Although he didn't name names it was clear that his targets were among others Baen Books, Charlie Stross, and Cory Doctorow, and his bile clearly splashes on people like myself. His gripe was that writers who give away professional-quality work on-line

... undercut the efforts of his fellow workers to gain better pay and working conditions for all. [T]hey undercut those of us who aren't giving it away for free and are trying to get publishers to pay a better wage for our hard work.

I felt I was not the president who would bless the contraction of our industry toward monopoly, or who would give imprimatur to the downward spiral that is converting the noble calling of Writer into the life of Pixel-stained Technopeasant Wretch.

In honor of this rather peculiar sentiment (Hendrix rightly calls himself "retrograde"), SF Writers Jo Walton has declared that today, March 23rd, is International Pixel-stained Technopeasant Day.

For my part on this day (and because, really, I can only tease and annoy my fans for so long), I have decided to release the first major arc of Sterlings, all five chapters, for your perusal pleasure.

• 075 / 06119 Sterlings: The Old Country Returns
• 079 / 06119 Sterlings: Nothing Like A New Job
• 093 / 06119 Sterlings: You Just Don't Get It
• 151 / 06119 Sterlings: Not The Heat She Wanted
• 189 / 06119 Sterlings: The Moment To Wait For

If you go to the index and press Toggle Arcs, you'll see that this one is labeled "Sterlings: Rhiane". Rhiane's arc is the most vanilla and romantic of the major Sterlings arcs; the story codes for this as posted to alt.sex.stories.moderated would be FF, slow with hints of all kinds of other things going on around our terribly repressed main characters. The gonzo gets going a little later, when Polly gets her own arc.

Enjoy!

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Bias, skepticism, and nonsense

Okay, I owe you an apology. Two weeks ago I posted an article about in which I compared UK schools' refusal to teach the Holocaust for fear of upsetting Muslims to US schools' refusal to teach evolution for fear of upsetting Christians. As it now turns out, concern about the former may have been completely overblown. It is not a national crisis of teaching in the UK; it seems to have been a few anecdotes, not a reliable survey of course teachings.

Concern about the latter, however, is not. Half of all public schools in this country elide evolutionary biology in their biology courses for the simple reason that the teachers don't want to have to talk to angry parents.

I mention this because today I read from Americans United for Church and State that The Pentagon has agreed to allow fallen Wiccan soldiershave the pentacle on their gravestones. Barry Lynn is sometimes given to hyperbole so his statement that opposition to the recognition of the Wiccan symbol came from Bush personally makes my newly sensitized skepticism meter twitch just a little bit. My suspicion is raised because there are no links off the page to support Lynn's contention.

Making your lives easier, one day at a time.

I have approximately 600 fans. I know this because, while I don't track who reads what, I do track what gets read. Ignoring Google and Yahoo, stories introduced on the Pendorwright site after it came up have been downloaded and read by real browsers approximately 600 times or so. I don't know how many read them through ASSTR and I can't know via Usenet, so I'm basically left assuming that, since every collection points the user back to the Pendorwright site, I have about 600 fans. That's not too bad; 20 times the national average.

To make your lives easier (and mine, I suppose) I have added an RSS feed to the site. It's a pretty generic feed at this time; I have some work to do to get it snazzier, but it will let you know when new stories have been added.