So an interesting thing happened to me the other day: I felt like maybe I wasn’t geeky enough.

As anyone who was a geek as a child and is still a geek now will know there is a moment, usually not even a definable one, where the moniker ‘geek’ stops stinging and you begin to see it as a badge of honour instead of an insult. Besides, these days everyone knows who really runs things and it isn’t the ‘cool’ kids. So I haven’t been ashamed of geekery for many years. But I also haven’t thought “Hey, you know, I should probably be a bit more geeky”.

So why now?

Well, the thing is, Gary Gygax is dead. Gary Gygax is dead and I’ve never played a game of Dungeons & Dragons in my life.

I’m too much of a geek to just go “well that’s a good thing” and leave it at that, because I’m well aware of the influence the game and the man have had on our culture. And by ‘our’ culture I’m not just talking about geeks. I’ve been reading all the heartfelt dedications to him this past week, seeing how so many minds and lives were moulded by their experiences with pen, paper and platonic solids. It makes me feel like I have missed out on something. Something now irretrievable. Not because the man himself is dead, for the game will probably live on longer than all of us in one form or another, but because those days of parents’ basements and the thrill of staying up late are gone. Those tomes will never seem arcane to me now. I like to think that I’m still quite open-minded, but the stakes are raised each time your mind is blown and goblins probably won’t do it anymore.

I cut my geek-teeth on golden age science fiction and early 8-bit gaming, from the glorius 16 shades of green on my father’s Amstrad, to the amazing adventures of Pitfall Harry. Soon enough I was coding and writing myself. And in the end, though I’ve never rolled a 20-sided die in my life I guess I’ve arrived in a similar place to a lot of the people who learned to geek that way. Even so, it still seems like a bit of a shame that I’ve never played.

Hopefully I can find some friends who feel the same, or are at least open-minded, and rectify the situation.

No decisions made yet, but a couple of points were made to me about this affecting the chances of it being published in a physical book.

Admittedly yes, this is a possibility, given that we live in a world where the people who produce content and the people who consume that content are separated by corporate entities who are scared to let anything out of their control. It has been widely shown that releasing stuff for free on the internet only helps commercial sales. The problem is that there are a lot of companies out there who see the people who download content as extra potential customers rather than the reality, which is that in the majority of cases they either become customers regardless of free access to the content or never would have been customers or even experienced the content if it hadn’t been free.

That last one is actually a very important point to someone who isn’t in all of this for the money. The only reason I want my writing (and music) to make money is so that I can support the making of more writing (and music) without resorting to some mind-numbing soul-stealing day job on the side. Other than that, it is not a motivation. I don’t want to be rich, I don’t want to be famous, but I do want my stuff to be read. If someone who would never have bought my stuff in the first place gets access to it for free, that’s a bonus for me. If someone who would have bought it reads for free then decides it’s not worth paying money for or at least donating some small amount then yes, that’s a bit of a shame but I’m not trying to trick people into giving me money, so I can live with that. If someone thinks it’s worth money they will give me money somehow. Whether it’s through a donation, or buying the next one, or random merchandise or just buying me a drink when they see me out and about. Unless they’re a real asshole, and honestly there’s nothing you can do about them anyway.

So, the publishing thing. There are companies that will publish something that’s been released under a CC license. Speculative fiction publishers (Tor and the like) in particular seem to be reasonably forward-thinking. (Just as an aside, speculative fiction includes sci-fi, but is not restricted to sci-fi. And yes, all fiction is speculative, but I could argue that all music is folk so let’s not get bogged down in semantics here)

There are examples of works being picked up wholesale from the net and published, examples of publishing deals where the work is released simultaneously to book and electronic form, and examples where old works are released under a CC license to generate renewed interest (perhaps for a new book release). And there are thousands and thousands of examples of CC works that haven’t been picked up for publishing. Is that because companies aren’t forward thinking enough, because the works themselves get lost in the aether of the ever-changing web, or because they are just crap? A mix of all three, of course, but I’ve been around this web a couple of times and I’m convinced that if something is deserving of notice and the author/artist is in any way savvy and puts in any effort then it will be noticed. Word of mouth is pretty powerful when all those mouths are connected so tightly to one another, and whether or not you like the morals, the free market does for the most part work.

If I release my book under a CC license it is done and cannot be revoked. I can of course take the book offline. The license will not apply to any copies released under different terms, and it doesn’t stop me from making money from the books. Anyone who got a copy from me under a CC license, however, will be bound only under the terms of that license and will thus be free to distribute it as they see fit so long as they attribute it to me and don’t make money off it. So too will be the people they give it to. I’ve got to say that that doesn’t bother me. It might bother some publishers, but chances are those are the publishers who have always secretly (and sometimes not so secretly) been against lending books to friends and second-hand bookstores and libraries.

I meant to focus on the flipside here as well, but I really should go do some work or I’ll never get this PhD. To be seen in a future note some time soon: Why releasing this for free might make it more likely that I get published.

(This post and the one after it are crossposted from my facebook. Originally I was planning on just asking a question, but it turns out I have quite a few opinions on this whole topic so I decided that my blog really should start being a blog. After these two I will try to do it the other way around – link my RSS feed to my facebook in case anyone over there cares and post the rants themselves here. )

So I’ve been tossing around a little idea lately, and I thought I’d see if anybody has any feedback. The basic background, for anyone that doesn’t know, is that I love to write but haven’t quite had the energy/motivation/inspiration to write anything from start to finish for a while now for a number of reasons, including one that starts with “PhD” and ends with pain and suffering.
A few years back I wrote a novel. It’s quite hard for a first-time author to even get a manuscript onto the desk of a publisher, so I had to try to get an agent, and they had a different vision for the book than I did (based on what little they actually read). So I got disheartened, then distracted by uni workload ramping up and it all just fell by the wayside.

The thing is, sappiness and needing a good hard edit aside, I love that novel. Or, maybe more accurately, I love those characters. They want to be read, and they want the other two books of the trilogy to be written.

So here’s the idea: I am considering publishing my work for free online under a Creative Commons license. By-nc 3.0, to be exact

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/

The basic idea with that is that it’s free and anyone can download it and send it to their friends, even do fan translations or similar projects, so long as they don’t make any money off it themselves. Furthermore, it doesn’t sign away my own commercial rights, so if a publisher did want to pick the book up eventually there would be no problem there.

I’m hoping that if it is actually good enough to read then word will get around a bit and people will comment and perhaps make suggestions, or even better demand that I write the other books. The bigger plan is that some kind of feedback may help to kickstart my writing again.

If I do decide to do this it won’t be instant, because like I say there are sections (mostly the beginning) that need a good hard edit. Not to mention the fact that I am trying to finish up my PhD here, so I spend the majority of my time either working on that, procrastinating from working on that, or recovering from working on that. But the characters want to be read, so I think I should probably do something about that.

Does anyone have any comments, suggestions, or demands for immediacy? I’d like to know if people think this is a good idea or not.

Nearly five and a half years ago the original Neon Winter launched. There was no domain – an ugly geocities address the only access point. It wasn’t my first web presence, but it was the first site I had all to myself – an outpouring of works and words and self. Then, as now, it seemed a good idea to keep myself occupied – and I am wary of the unsettling symmetry – but more than that it was a garden of sorts for things that would not grow away from the light. Five and a half years on and the prolific outpouring of character and place has slowed almost to a halt, yet the seeds still come as thick and fast as ever. Many things are needed for growth – fertile soil is one of them, and this site fills that purpose. We shall see if I can find the others in time.

This blog (I use the word in full awareness of its horrid and unapologetic abruptness – I know many who despise it, but I must admit I feel a sympathy. Our biological evolution may have tracked to a crawl long ago yet our evolution itself has evolved into something new, and our language keeps up as best it can.) will not be the place for these horticultural experiments in creativity, though I may use this space to talk about the process itself. The blog I envisage as a place to expound on the many things I no doubt have to say about things themselves.

I will apologise now, and indeed only this once, about what may seem like pretentiousness, absent-mindedness or insanity. I do enjoy playing with words and though I am, I am told, perfectly capable of throwing them together in normal comprehensible patterns known to many as phrases, sentences or paragraphs, I am moved more to throw them together in ways that seem pleasing or amusing to me. There will be obscure words dredged from dictionaries esoteric; there will be seemingly unrelated and meandering detours; and there will be phrases started with conjunctions.

Because I can.