"I'm also 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."

As a successful "webscab" I thought I should respond to this little bit of nonsense. I object to Hendrix's characterizations for a number of reasons, but most because I'm so surprised at the bizarre notion he has of how publishing works, and how it should work.

Writers of speculative fiction don't comprise a union. They are in direct competition with one another, both for the attention of editors and publishers and also for sales to book-buyers. I published on-line, for free, to develop a readership. The existence of that readership made me attractive to my publisher. The size of my deal was not determined by the fact that I had published online--like all book contracts, it was determined through mathematical determination of how many books the publisher expected to sell in correlation with how much money I'd be willing to accept. There is no "minimum wage" in publishing, nor is there really a wage at all. Writers work for royalties, not salaries or hourly rates. There's a reason for that. Competition makes the best work rise to the top, and is the main way that writers can judge their own talent and effect.

Since 2004 I've been giving away my work for free online--and then charging for the print version. I've worked very hard for years to build a following and the web has been the chief tool I've used toward that purpose. It has paid off for me, and as far as I can tell it hasn't hurt anyone--in fact it has inspired several people to write their own books, and to pursue their own publishing deals.

Somewhere along the line I joined the HWA, the Horror Writer's Association. I never received a newsletter or a membership card or a secret decoder ring for my sixty dollars; certainly the HWA did nothing to help me get a better deal from my publishers. What they did do was first recommend me for a Stoker award for Best Novel, then disqualify me because I had previously serialized "Monster Island" online. The extremely hard work I'd done to get my book recognized was now seen as a mark against me. It's truly sad to me to hear that the SFWA has taken the same tack. I can't see how Hendrix's rant, or his organization, can be said to be encouraging or helping writers in any way. As before--as always--writers are on their own to get their own careers going, and to make their own rent. If giving away work for free online works toward that end I can't recommend it enough.

And yeah, I'll be taking part in this. Proudly.

Comments on the Board

Dave's books are available in bookstores everywhere. We encourage you to buy them at a local shop. You can also find them online.

Copyright 2006

The grass under the bleachers was striped with yellow light. It lit up an old abandoned gym sock, a couple of foil condom wrappers. He kicked a nest of beer cans out of the way and sat down in the dirt. It had been a long day. He had three courses worth of homework to catch up on if he wanted to stay in the seventh grade. Otherwise they were going to hold him back.

His psychologist said it would be best if he stayed with his age group. It would help his socialization. His probation officer said if he didn't keep up with the other seventh graders he would recommend military school.

The next six months were going to be hell. His friends had already deserted him, of course, and his Mom wasn't talking to him. He had therapy three times a week, and group therapy on the weekend. He had anger management Monday nights. He was supposed to go to a different school every Tuesday and talk about teenage violence for an hour. About how bad it was. He still didn't know what he was going to tell the kiddies. For the next ten minutes though, before science class started, he was free.

Free. A year earlier he hadn't known what that word meant. Now he understood. Freedom meant doing what everybody told you to do. It meant not making any choices on your own. If you did, then they locked you up, and you weren't free any more.

He pulled one bent cigarette out of his jeans jacket and lit it with a paper match. Smoking was something he'd picked up in the hospital. It allowed you to be alone for awhile, to have something to do that was just about you. They also said it shortened your lifespan. That sounded pretty good.

A shadow blipped across the grass in front of him. Overhead he heard the bleachers ring as somebody in sneakers tripped down from the top. He looked up and held his breath. He did not want to be discovered there. If he was caught smoking, who knew what they would do to him?

The footsteps stopped. The shadow lay right across his face. Shit. He pulled his head down into the collar of his jeans jacket like a turtle making itself small.

"Hey," a girl said. It was a girl up there, maybe a sixth grader. Maybe younger.

"Leave me alone," he told her. He couldn't think of any better way to make her go away. Scare her, maybe. He had found out he was pretty good at scaring people. It would probably get him in trouble, though, if he scared her.

He could see her eyes through the gap between two rows of seats. She had blonde hair in pigtails. She stared down at him, blinking once in a while.

He stubbed out his cigarette. It wasn't just his if she was watching him and he didn't want it then. "Please," he sighed. "Please leave me alone."

She kept staring. "You're Matt B______."

Why deny it? But he didn't confirm it either.

"You're the boy who--"

"Please," he said. "Don't say it."

"Okay," she said.

"Thanks."

She blinked at him again. "You say it, then. You tell me what you did."

"What?" Anger stood up inside him. "What the fuck?"

"Come on," she said. "At Assembly they talked about you. They told us what you did but they said we should try to understand and see it from your side. But they didn't tell us your side. So tell me now."

His hands squeezed into fists until his finger bones creaked. He wanted to tell her to fuck off. He wanted her to die. Then he opened his mouth. "My Dad tried to fuck me. Is that what you want to hear?"

"Almost," she said.

Who the hell was she? Who was this girl?

Fine.

Fine, he thought. Tell her the truth. Maybe that would scare her off. "Okay. He did fuck me. A lot. And my Mom didn't even want to hear about it. I tried telling my teacher but I was too embarrassed. So he kept fucking me. He was going to keep fucking me until I was too old for him, and then, he said, he was going to kill me so nobody would ever know. So I picked a night when my Mom was at my Aunt's house. I had taken all the poison stuff out of a bunch of roach motels and I put it in his beer. It didn't kill him right away. It took hours. I had to watch him curling up on the couch, grabbing his stomach in his hands. He kept begging me to call an ambulance."

"And then he died," the girl said.

"Yes! He died! I killed my Dad. Okay?"

"Yeah," she said.

Her eyes disappeared. She was sitting up on the bleachers.

"Was that good enough?" he demanded. "Is that exactly what you wanted to know?"

The eyes came back. A hand snaked through the gap between the seats. A little girl's hand. It opened up and a crumpled ball of green paper fell out.

"Last night my Dad came into my room. He made me take my panties off. That's all," she said. "But I know next time he's going to want more. Is that enough?"

"What?" he asked. But then he reached for the paper she'd dropped. It was fifty dollar bills crumpled together. He smoothed them out and they were flat and dry. There was three hundred dollars there. Her birthday money, he figured.

"Is that enough?" she asked again. "Will you do my Dad, too?"

It was not until June, however, when the mosquitoes were swarming like dark clouds and the ravens were brooding up on the ledges that we turned up the mummified human remains.

The Professor stopped across the primary trench, one hiking boot on either side, his grimy hands down in the shallow cut we'd made in the earth. He looked up at me quite suddenly and I thought for a moment he was having a stroke. At eighty-two he was the oldest member of the University's archaeology faculty and despite his possession of an endowed chair he was rumored to be well past his prime. When I was assigned to work with him on the Devil's Elbow site my heart had sunk. The other graduate assistants were off to Chile, to Botswana, to real digs, to important work. I was stuck with the old man mucking about in a piece of Massachusetts back woods that had probably been tilled by farmers for two hundred years before we got there.

He looked up at me, his clouded eyes ridiculous under his floppy hat, and he quietly asked me for a toothbrush. I handed one up to him and returned to my task-I was sitting in a hole three feet away, scrubbing bits of stone with a washcloth to see if they might be flints or scrapers or burins. A job, he had confessed, that was meant for sharper eyes than his own-it can be hard to tell the difference between early tools and the rocks they were made from. The Professor cleared his throat and I looked up again. He thought, he said, that perhaps I should come have a look. He thought he could use a second opinion. Then he held up a partial human skull with some hair and skin still attached.

A mosquito landed on the back of my arm but I was paralyzed with emotion and couldn't brush her away. She sank her proboscis deep into my flesh and started sucking up my blood. The wound she made would itch for days. I didn't care at all. A find of human remains, in an area that should have been tapped out-the only word in my head was jackpot.

With trembling hands he handed the skull to me and I cradled it in my palms. I shouldn't be holding it at all, of course. It should be kept in its matrix, in the earth that had surrounded it for so many years. It should be kept in place until it was photographed and measured and its exact position recorded.

The professor had already broken that rule, however, so I didn't mind if I did take a real look. It was the first time I'd ever held such a find. I was entranced, deeply moved by the pathos of the simple object. The bone was brown with mud and much smaller than I might have expected. Impacted dirt filled the eye sockets and the delicate nasal cavity. A few teeth remained in the upper jaw but most were missing.

The hair and skin were astounding. They were so well preserved. Dirty, yes, but still intact. We knew the local Native Americans had inhabited the Devil's Elbow site as recently as five hundred years past, but even in that short amount of time any soft tissues should have been obliterated by erosion and the depredations of insects. Yet the find was not without precedent. If the soil at our site was acidic enough, or conversely, not acidic enough-if the burials had been especially deep, if they had been made during winter, in frozen earth-

The professor started scraping at the trench like a dog digging for a buried treat. I nearly jumped out of my hole to take his arm and pull him back. He could easily damage the fragile remains that way. I was already thinking of thesis work, of postgraduate papers I could write about these finds. I was already thinking of them as mine, even if by tradition anything I wrote would have to be topped by the Professor's name. Everyone would know, I thought, they would understand that the old coot's name was just there for show. That this was my find, my discovery. And it would be mine-by right, if not by fact-if I could keep the old man from destroying the remains. I could spend years describing just the skull. I could make it the cornerstone of a career-how long had it been since any Paleo-Indian remains with intact soft tissues were found in New England? The region was supposedly dug-out, wholly exploited by generations of workers.

I leaned down over the trench and tried to hold my breath. Even the condensation in my breath, even the bacteria in my mouth could damage the remains, I knew. The Professor had disturbed a number of bones in his frantic scratching. I counted the ribs and the finger bones and quickly saw we had more than one body in the trench. Excitement mounted on excitement in my soul. I had to know how many mummies we had discovered. The Professor had already disarranged the bones-I could hardly worsen the situation by taking a quick peek. Gently I lifted away a leg assemblage with some leathery skin and what appeared to be a moccasin still on the foot. From beneath two more skulls stared up at the sky. If anything they were in better shape than the one on top. That made a certain amount of sense. Worms and beetles are picky feeders and they tend to work in one given layer of the soil column, ignoring anything below or above their preferred zone. I peered down into the recess below the leg and studied these new faces. Faces that might have been submerged beneath the earth for hundreds of years. Who were they? I began to wonder though I knew endless hours of tedious work stretched out before me before I could begin to answer such a question.

"I beg your pardon," the Professor said, behind me. I ignored him and reached down to touch something shiny on one of the new faces. It was a metal stud in the skull's (mostly) intact nose. Incredible!

"I think we should summon the proper authorities," the Professor coughed out.

I shook my head and touched the stud again. The culture that had buried these bodies had never worked with metal, as far as we know. Their tools were made of flaked stone. Perhaps they had traded with another, more advanced culture. Perhaps even with the Vikings who were the first Europeans in the area. The stud might have been a symbol of immense importance to the people who lived at the Devil's Elbow.

"You want to bring others from the U in here?" I asked. Why would he want to share the glory? Maybe he knew he was too old to properly exploit a dig like this. Maybe he was, I thought, but I was primed and ready. I'd spent five long years of my life learning how to exploit a dig like this, and nobody was going to-

"No," he whispered. "I think perhaps the local police are more in order."

I spun around and saw he was holding a human arm in his hands. Most of its skin was intact and I could see fine dark hairs on the forearm and the back of the shriveled hand. I could also see the arm wore a digital watch on its wrist.

My mind spun. I sat down hard on the edge of the trench. I understood instantly, at least subconsciously, what I was looking at, but my conscious mind-

-the metal stud in the nose of specimen number three, the impossible metal stud that couldn't belong to the prehistoric settlers of the Devil's Elbow area, a nose stud of some shiny metal-

"We have to get out of here," I said, and the Professor seemed to agree. I was panicking, I knew, there was no immediate danger. Yet I wanted nothing so much as to run away, to get away from what had suddenly revealed itself to be a charnel pit. No, not even that.

I was sitting on the edge of a shallow grave, with my legs dangling inside.

I jumped up and made for the road. The Professor tried to gather up his tools but I took his arm and pulled him away from there without any concern for University property. He couldn't move as quickly as I could but I urged him on, spurring him down the path to where we'd left his battered old Nissan Sentra. "We can come back later for the gear," I promised.

How little did I know. When I reached the parking place-just a narrow area of thin grass on the shoulder of the road-I found we were parked in. An enormous pickup truck blocked our escape. No one was in the driver's seat. I ran around to the far side, to look in the passenger's window. There was someone in there, a woman who appeared to be asleep. I knocked on the glass to try to wake her, intending to ask her to move her truck. Then I noticed that her throat had been slit from ear to ear.

It was that time of day when sunlight still burns on the tops of trees but down at ground level night is already falling. When the darkness between the trunks is cool, and blue, and secretive. I leaned my forehead against the cool metal of the truck and was simply, purely, afraid.

"Ah, hello, there," the Professor said. He was still on the far side of the truck and had no idea what I had found. I didn't know how to warn him in time. I hurried around the side of the truck to see someone walking out from between those trees. He was fastening up the button-front of his jeans. He was not a particularly large man, nor did he seem terribly bright. But he had a folding knife in his hand and he came toward us as if he already knew what we were going to say.

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