Pondering the Pirate: Heavy Metal Honey
Thursday, March 21st, 2013by Doranna
People can come up with all sorts of lame justifications for stealing. I have no interest in the justifications…and no sympathy for them. Pirating digital works is stealing, and no…no one is entitled to read my stuff for free unless I put that work on free. And pirates, no matter what they think of themselves, are not modern-day Captain Jacks. Also, they totally aren’t Johnny Depp sexy.
That, I guess, would be my position statement on the whole thing. And yet…
This has been an interesting week for pirates. There was a brazen pirate shop that popped up with a huge selection of books (including quite a number of mine)…and that charged for them, too. Well, huzzah! That site has already hit the dust, but of course there’s already another of that brazen sort popping up.
And then there’s scribd.
Those of us who have been around the Internets for a while remember when scribd started up, and that there was a whole big lot of froo ha ha along the way. They’re still remiss; they still allow blatantly pirated works to be posted. But they do take them down if you ask (in my experience).
So why am I not asking?
Because the work currently being pirated there is called Heavy Metal Honey.
Heavy Metal Honey was one of Harlequin’s early e-reads, written to a fairly exacting pattern of chapters and word count. In this case, it was published as a supplement to the Bombshell line, and it’s a story in the world of the Hunter Agency, featuring two of my favorite characters: Kimmer and Rio.
Okay, Kimmer and Rio fans…raise your hand if you’ve even heard of Heavy Metal Honey.
Exactly.
The thing is that Harlequin isn’t doing anything with that story–and hasn’t for many years–but the rights aren’t vulnerable to reversion. So I can’t do anything with it, and I have no control over whether they do anything with it, and no one gets to read it at all, and I like that story, darnit!
So if you like Kimmer and Rio, or if you like the Bombshells, or if you like short fiction with attitude, and you happen to go to scribd, and you happen to search on Heavy Metal Honey…
Well, enjoy! And by all means spread the word.
But pirates still suck. Welcome to the world of the inconsistent human.




THE HEART OF DOG
NIGHT OF THE TIGER
$.99









