A Place So Foreign

This story is from my collection, "A Place So Foreign and Eight More," publishedby Four Walls Eight Windows Press in September, 2003, ISBN 1568582862. I'vereleased this story, along with five others, under the terms of a CreativeCommons license that gives you, the reader, a bunch of rights that copyrightnormally reserves for me, the creator.I recently did the same thing with the entire text of my novel, "Down and Out inthe Magic Kingdom" (http://craphound.com/down), and it was an unmitigatedsuccess. Hundreds of thousands of people downloaded the book -- good news -- andthousands of people bought the book -- also good news. It turns out that, asnear as anyone can tell, distributing free electronic versions of books is agreat way to sell more of the paper editions, while simultaneously getting thebook into the hands of readers who would otherwise not be exposed to my work.I still don't know how it is artists will earn a living in the age of theInternet, but I remain convinced that the way to find out is to do basicscience: that is, to do stuff and observe the outcome. That's what I'm doinghere. The thing to remember is that the very *worst* thing you can do to me asan artist is to not read my work -- to let it languish in obscurity anddisappear from posterity. Most of the fiction I grew up on is out-of-print, andthis is doubly true for the short stories. Losing a couple bucks to people whowould have bought the book save for the availability of the free electronic textis no big deal, at least when compared to the horror that is being irrelevantand unread. And luckily for me, it appears that giving away the text for freegets me more paying customers than it loses me.