Castles: Now Creative Commons Licensed!

I just marked up the Castles site with a Creative Commons license (attribute, non-commercial, share-alike). Download, redistribute, rewrite the content you find here freely, with my blessing. The Creative Commons are one of the most important groups working in the world today for reasons I won't get into right here, right now.

There are a number of reasons I chose the CC license. I think people have gotten very weird about creativity. Not too long ago people believed in spontaneous generation, or abiogenesis. That is, that things like maggots came to exist spontaneously in rotting meat out of nowhere, and so on. Current copyright law seems to rely on some mythic form of "originality," that new ideas can generate from nothingness, and not be derived from anything that has existed before.

Oh, please!

Look at Done Deal and tell find me one truly original script that has been sold. Listen to any song in the Top 40 and find me one idea that hasn't been expressed before in a thousand other songs. Of course there are a few geniuses, an occasional visionary who says something new, creates something no one has ever seen before, but these are incredibly rare. The rest of us just re-interperet the work of those who came before us. Anyone who tells you different is either lying or deluded.

This isn't a bad thing. It is who we are. Culture exists through the transmission of ideas. If we weren't reusing and remixing the work that has been done before, civilization would cease.

In Castles, I've tried to be as new and original as possible, but I'm no visionary. Many of the ideas are based on extensive research and anyone with access to a library and the Internet could have come up with the same ideas. On the remote chance that I'm the first person to put together these ideas this way, should I now say, "No, you don't repeat any of these ideas to anyone." Other ideas are conclusions I've come to based on observable evidence that anyone else could have come to also. Should I keep these ideas locked away, too? Other parts were inspired by every book I've read and loved, and I consider the book an homage to the writers who made me love reading. A number of them are actually mentioned in the book. While I hope that there's nothing in the book that is specifically like any author, I suspect my writing style is a montage of everyone I've ever read.

I write because I have something to say that I feel is important. I hope that people find my ideas worth repeating and worth developing. At the same time, I've worked really hard on this, and if someone find that these words have monetary value, I want a cut! The Creative Commons license lets both things happen.

Finally, I'm doing it for H. P. Lovecraft. He just might be an early American "Creative Common." He encouraged others to take his ideas and run with them. As a result, almost every horror writer of the 20th Century (probably the 21st, too) has written novels and stories that fit withing Lovecraft's "Cthulhu Mythos." Many movies too, including my favorites, the Evil Dead trilogy. Would Lovecraft have had such a lasting impact if he hadn't shared his universe?

Castles is my first novel, and while I don't think there's enough there to warrant a "Mythos," hopefully by the 50th novel, I'll have created such a vibrant and well-realized universe that others will want to create characters to inhabit it and new stories to perpetuate its history. The Creative Commons license seems like a great way to help make this possible.

Plus, I love the new "developing nations" CC license, allowing commercial versions of my work in developing countries. I think Castles would make a great soap opera. I used to be a big fan of Mexican soap operas when I lived in Portsmouth and got the Spanish station. They seemed like such better quality than American soap operas. Castles could be a sort of Dark Shadows crossed with Mexican soap opera thing. How cool would that be?