It all started when Dr. Howard V. Hendrix, current VP of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, delivered a rant about people giving away their works for free on the Internets,

I’m… opposed to the increasing presence in our organization of webscabs, who post their creations on the net for free.  A scab is someone who works for less than union wages or on non-union terms; more broadly, a scab is someone who feathers his own nest and advances his own career by undercutting the efforts of his fellow workers to gain better pay and working conditions for all. Webscabs claim they’re just posting their books for free in an attempt to market and publicize them, but to my mind they’re undercutting 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.

Since more and more of SFWA is built around such electronically mediated networking and connection based venues, and more and more of our membership at least tacitly blesses the webscabs (despite the fact that they are rotting our organization from within) — given my happily retrograde opinions, I felt I was not the president who would provide SFWAns the "net time" they seemed to want at this point in the organization’s development, or 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. 

As you would expect, this met with a certain amount of derision, head-shaking, and laughter.

First there was John Scalzi, who’s already stirring things up in SFWA with a write-in candidacy that could very well win, pointing out how well giving stuff away has worked for him. And Cory Doctorow. And Charlie Stross. And so on and so on. And adding that "It’s appalling that a standing Vice President of SFWA is calling a rather large chunk of his constituency backstabbing scum."

Then Jo Walton got into the act, declaring today to be International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day, "the day when pixel-stained technopeasants everywhere are stretching and smiling and putting down their technotools to celebrate their existence by releasing their works into the wild, or at least the web." Numerous authors have contributed, and Jo has been keeping a pretty complete list, along with a quick LiveJournal community that sprang up to document the phenomenon.

Of course, the webcomics folks have been doing this sort of thing for a long time now.

I’d like to do my part as well, but  most of my work has been work-for-hire so the selection’s a bit limited. Nevertheless, here’s a story previously published in Urban Nightmares by Baen Books… a story that, irony of ironies, helped get me into SFWA in the first place.

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