Downloadable

I'm interested in writers who make their work available for free online. Kelly Link, Cory Doctorow, and Jim Kelly are three writers I know of who put their work online after it's been published elsewhere. It makes sense--you can't sell it again. And getting people interested in your work will only help sales of things that can't be put online, like novels. More importantly, though, as Doctorow said in an interview with Jason Kottke:

copying is only going to get easier. It's the 21st century, there's not going to be a year in which it's harder to copy than this year; there's not going to be a day in which it's harder to copy than this day; from now on. Right? If copying gets harder, it's because of a nuclear holocaust. There's nothing else that's going to make copying harder from now on. And so, if your business model and your aesthetic effect in your literature and your work is intended not to be copied, you're fundamentally not making art for the 21st century.

So here's another online writer, writing about online, for free: Julian Dibble's My Tiny Life (via, not surprisingly, kottke). I haven't read it all yet, but the first chapter, A Rape In Cyberspace, is something I came across a couple of years ago while doing research (for a book on sex, for a professor at USM)--I was interested in how an online event can have repercussions in the real world. This was before myspace and all, remember.

If/when I am ever a Real and Published Writer, you can find my stuff online, for sure. And in whatever new media are invented between now and then.