Everyone crows about the end of Daylight Saving Time, “you get to sleep another hour!” I dunno if this started when i became a mother and when the baby cries, you HAVE to get up, but right now, when I wake up and it’s (according to my internal clock) after 6am, I get up. No going back to sleep. So I’ve been up since 520. Blech.

But the wee small hours of the morning is a great time to catch up on RSS, and I caught this gem from Patrick Nielsen Hayden at the Making Light blog. Apparently Cory Doctorow posted something on boingboing about a Creative Commons story he wrote being translated into Swedish, and he’s being raked through the coals for being too self-promoting. I have friends at Lulu who complain that Cory just blogs about himself as well. I admire Cory a great deal, both as a writer and an open media/privacy/eff/etc advocate, so I don’t think I’ve seen a post by him that bugged me.

Patrick brings up the concept of people complaining about Free Ice Cream. That Boing Boing is a blog, and people talk about things they like, their friends, and themselves on blogs. (Scrolls down to look at previous posts on my blog. Yep.)

Cory’s response, far politer than its target deserved, evidently occasioned more and longer complaints about the inadequacy, injustice, and unfairness of the free ice cream. Holy crap.

This, of course, got me thinking about my issues with free content and podcasting. I believe in giving my stuff away right now. Yeah, I’m an unashamed disciple of Cory - his passion for Creative Commons and his many talks have hammered home to me the usefulness of giving away content. And so far, he’s been right. Since giving away my content, I’ve started selling stories, I’ve built an audience of thousands, and am on the train carrying me away from Obscurityville. After a 10 month agent hunt, I launched my novel for free and after one day I was contacted by an agent. (He later passed on representing the novel, but it was a heady rush while it lasted. Still. Not obscure.) I’m going to be experimenting with other Creative Commons licenses in the future, just to see what can be done with them. I want to see what kind of derivative works people can come up with.

So I love podcasting, I love giving stuff away and seeing what happens. Unfortunately, one of the things that happens is that, while it’s fabulous to have people eager to experience your content, they can start to get a sense of entitlement and complain when their free ice cream is late or the wrong flavor. This stuff takes time, and to make it high quality takes a lot of work. And while podcasters, writers, webcomics artists and other creators are thrilled when someone loves our content so much they are out of their minds eager to get the next fix, it’s still frustrating and upsetting when the love turns nasty, angry, with a sense of injury that we are treating them poorly by giving them free content at a schedule that doesn’t suit them, or if a chapter disappointed.

Never let it be said that we don’t appreciate our listeners/readers. Our content is nothing but words and pictures in a drawer until someone experiences it. But I just hope that people remember that this is free ice cream, and a lot of work on our parts. If it’s late, or not what you expected, try a little patience, or put down that flavor of ice cream and try another.