I just signed the contracts on a comic book deal for six of my stories with IDW. They got the exclusive right to sell commercial comics based on my stories, but those stories are already under Creative Commons Attribution/ShareAlike/Noncommercial licenses that allow fans to make non-commercial comics (and films, etc) from them. My agent, Russell Galen, wrote a nifty little clause spelling this out (see below).

Lots of people have asked me whether doing a non-commercial CC release makes it impossible to sell commercial rights to a traditional publisher. Here’s how it can work:

The exclusive rights granted to Licensee hereunder are subject to a pre-existing Creative Commons license which grants members of the public the irrevocable and nonexclusive right to create their own adaptations of the Licensed Property, including comic books. Such Creative Commons-licensed works may not be sold or distributed for profit. Licensee acknowledges that under the terms of this Creative Commons license, members of the public may create comic book version of the Licensed Property for non-commercial distribution. Licensor agrees not to license the rights which are granted to Licensee hereunder to any competitor of Licensee or to any commercial enterprise intending to create adaptations of the Works for commercial distribution.

Here’s the list of stories that are being adapted:

Anda’s Game
I, Robot
After the Siege
When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth
Nimby and the D-Hoppers
Craphound

I’ve got a editorial in the March edition of Locus Magazine, “You Do Like Reading Off Screens,” that tries to explain why people who read off screens all day say that they won’t buy ebooks because they “don’t like reading off screens.”

“I don’t like reading off a computer screen” — it’s a cliché of the e-book world. It means “I don’t read novels off of computer screens” (or phones, or PDAs, or dedicated e-book readers), and often as not the person who says it is someone who, in fact, spends every hour that Cthulhu sends reading off a computer screen. It’s like watching someone shovel Mars Bars into his gob while telling you how much he hates chocolate…

The problem, then, isn’t that screens aren’t sharp enough to read novels off of. The problem is that novels aren’t screeny enough to warrant protracted, regular reading on screens.

Link

This is the most incredible accolade I’ve ever received: I have been honored with the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award, which “recognizes individuals and organizations that have made significant and influential contributions to the development of computer-mediated communications and to the empowerment of individuals in using computers and the Internet.” I join the ranks of previous winners, including Tim Berners-Lee, Mitch Kapor, Jimmy Wales, Bruce Sterling, and Linus Torvalds. My fellow winners this year are Yochai Benkler and Bruce Schneier. Talk about exalted company! The awards will be given out at a ceremony chaired by Marc Cuban, at the Emerging Tech conference in San Diego later this month. I’m incredibly thankful to EFF for this honor.

Link

My latest InfoWeek column is online, “The Web Can Humiliate Dumb Companies. Can It Make Them Smarter?”

Dysfunctional consumer companies know only two modes of customer service: Abusive contempt, or slobbering, cringing remorse. Cory Doctorow describes how broken companies can make good customer service the standard.

Link

This summer marks the first year that the venerable Clarion Writers’ Workshop will run at the University of California at San Diego. Previously, the legendary science fiction writers’ boot-camp was hosted at Michigan State, where I attended it in 1992 and taught in 2005.

I’m returning as an instructor this year, along with a truly superb line-up of teachers: Greg Frost, Jeff VanderMeer (he was one of my Clarion 1992 classmates!), Karen Joy Fowler, Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman. Each instructor teaches for a week (the last pair of instructors co-teach for two weeks). Every day, the small group of students (generally fewer than 20) critique each others’ manuscripts, with the instructor pitching in. The instructors give lectures and meet one-on-one with students, sometimes throwing in assignments. They’re available to chat with about the writing life, the business of writing, the creative process and so on — it’s an incredible opportunity for writers at the beginning of their careers to glean a wide range of industry contacts and perspective on what it means to be a professional science fiction writer.

Mostly, this is about the writing, though. Writing stories. Most students write a story every week of the workshop, and you will usually critique 3-5 stories on any given day. This is a lot of work — it’s not for the faint of heart. Clarion challenges its students to go beyond their limits and accomplish more than they ever knew they could. Writing that much, critiquing that much — you end up living and breathing the craft, thinking of nothing else for weeks on end. It changes you.

I’m the writer I am today because of my Clarion experiences. There isn’t a day that’s gone by in the past 15 years that I haven’t thought of some bit of wisdom I gleaned during my six weeks. It’s an honor to teach there, and to serve on the board of The Clarion Foundation, the nonprofit that administers Clarion.

I’m not the only one. Clarion’s roster of alumni include Bruce Sterling, Kelly Link, Nalo Hopkinson, Octavia Butler, Lucius Sheppard, Eileen Gunn, James Patrick Kelly, Kim Stanley Robinson, Tim Pratt and Gordon Van Gelder.

The application deadline is April 1, 2007 — you’ll need two complete short stories between 2,500 and 6,000 words, the willingness to give up six weeks of your life to writing, and the tuition money. I hope to see you there.

Link

See also: Kate Wilhelm’s must-read writerly advice/history of Clarion

Today’s Vancouver Sun has a nice article on me on the front page of the Business section.