Free eBook Editions

Making myself blind reading on an iPhone

I wanted to make an offer to those purchasing hardcopies of the following 2011-2012 releases: Fallen Nation Party At The World's End, Apocalyptic Imaginary, and 404 Documents.

If you bought any of these books, hard-copy, and would like the eBook gratis, just contact me personally. I get order info from Amazon pretty frequently, but in general I'll take your work for it. As much as I like to make a living from my work, it's more of a drive to get the material read in the first place.

Busy Bees (Update)

If you haven't noticed, I've been busy churning out the content.

The 404 Documents and Apocalyptic Imaginary: Best of Modern Mythology 2011 both made it to Amazon distribution today. They are also available as ebooks. Check them out on my writing page. 

There you'll find a little about each of them--and as soon as I have a second, a link to a sample for each will join the lineup. Only so much time in the day.

Nate (aka Rusty Shackleford, aka Bradley The Buyer, aka ...) and I are presently working on solidifying the album, "Used People Using People," which is the companion piece to the 404 Documents. Did someone say transmedia? It's also some of the raunchiest music I've worked on in a while, and that's probably saying something.

So, yeah. Help out some independent artists and give some of these things a whirl. At this point there's a little bit for everyone with a bit of ideological adventure and an attention span. Some people still have those, right?

Next up after the album looks like full-tilt on Bedlam Stories and possibly a day job gig working in social media. I'll keep you posted. For now, I'm going to give my needy kitty Princess Galadriel some love. (Siddhartha is a bit more self-reliant.)

-J

Contextualizing Social Media (and Marketing)

Doug Rushkoff is pretty spot on here, as he often is. (Though it's a little disjointed at first.)

Instead of adding another layer of commentary... just check out the video.



Douglas Rushkoff: Branding Doesn't Work! So Now What? from Portland Oregon on Vimeo.

404 Documents eBook

$2.99 on Smashwords. Look for more vendors and formats soon.

Adam Jones was living the life: good job, sweet girlfriend (a redhead to boot), car, house. But in just one year, he will be incarcerated for participation in a vast terrorist conspiracy. It all started with Bradley the Buyer, calling him from the annals of their sordid past. Bradley, a first-rate freak and self-proclaimed criminal mastermind. Maybe it was boredom or curiosity, but he took the call. Soon, Adam is doing "Ops" with his psychotic friend. When a reality prank goes too far, he tries to get out. But it is already too late. There is no way out but through. By the end, he finds out how deep the rabbit-hole goes, but not before sacrificing his body, soul, and his cozy suburban dream in the process. Written off the headlines, this modern myth blurs the lines between fiction and reality.

 From the Fallen Nation world.

Cover for 404 Documents

The rough cover for the conspiracy fiction novella I have been working on with Nate. It'll probably sit on the slate while I'm hammering out Bedlam Stories, and then will be polished and shot out into the world. It is a return to some old themes in a new way.

Nyssa Update

As some of you know, I've been moving forward with issue 1 of Nyssa, a modern dark fairy tale. (Unillustrated text here.)

Drawing concept sketches, or material that can be scanned in and use as an underpainting of sorts in Photoshop.

I have also had some other artists signing on. Here's the first: Alex Andreev and Olga Sukhotinskaya.



A few of their pieces:

I intend for issue 1 to be something of an artist notebook, produced by the protagonist in his obsession of Nyssa.

Issue 2, which is mostly plotted but not written, I am hoping to produce in a more graphic novel style, as the story I intend to tell with that issue would work better in that format. This is what I love about transmedia as a concept, though of course sometimes we can't match medium with vision based on budget or other "real world" concerns.

Here's to trying, however.

Bedlam Stories Mad Hatter

Some pre-production buzz from Quiet Earth:

We recently announced that director Pearry Teo was hard at work on Bedlam Stories, a twisted new take on Alice and Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz. We were excited.

Now, to add to the first two horrifically beautiful pieces of character art for the film (Cheshire Cat included), we've just been passed the first look at The Mad Hatter from the film. This is classic Teo stuff here, folks. Like if Hellraiser went to Wonderland.

Synopsis:
Set in the 1920s, in Bedlam Asylum, the story revolves around Dorothy of Oz and Alice from Wonderland as they are brought into the asylum to treat their fantasy land delusions. But doctors soon realize that the patients' imaginations may actually be real.

Nyssa, Part 1: Love Notes To A Stranger (Unillustrated)

Photo: James Curcio, Rachel Reynolds. 

A dark modern fairy-tale.

I am beginning work on putting together this piece as an illustrated story, but have released the text online eBook for those that want this (cheaper) version. Pick it up for $.99 on smashwords. It'll be showing up in Amazon's store in a week or two. It's live on Amazon's Kindle store as well.

Bedlam Stories

Can't say too much about it yet, but things are looking very good for Bedlam Stories to go into production in 2012. Here's some concept art from Chad Michael Ward:

I'll be writing for it, and possibly contributing some other media. More here when I'm able to share it!

While you're waiting, why don't you check out one of the many projects I put out in 2011?

Apocalyptic Imaginary Early Edition Available as eBook

This book captures and expands upon the unique commentary and analysis that has helped define the Modern Mythology project in 2011. Through the voices of many contributors, we collectively take a hard look at the blurred lines between narrative and truth, philosophy and literature, personal history and cultural memory. All of this is done with an eye towards the imagined apocalypse that is always just around the corner.

Available as PDF, .epub, Kindle and more on Smashwords.

$18 paperback. 

Media and Monetizing The Container

By James Curcio
Some of us still remember going to a store to buy a CD, a tape... a record! Or a book. Most of us don't want to buy just any book. We want to buy a book with certain content. A book associated with a certain author or idea we are attracted to.

A few of us bemoan the loss of quality that occurred with the containers themselves over the years. The decline of paper quality, the loss of craftsmanship in the process of mechanization, mass-market industrialization. They are the few who relish the feel of the material object in their hand, consider its craftsmanship a part of what it is. Books themselves used to be works of art. But this is unfortunately an even older perspective on media. Most consumers don't think much about the container, the packaging, or anything else. It is all to be discarded, it is all attractive junk. They want to devour the "good stuff" inside. Or maybe they just want to put the book on their bookshelf and make people think they read it.

You know the story of what's happened. Digital media doesn't require a container. You can download an album, a movie, and now a book, without needing a container. You can carry hundreds or thousands of them around with you. And so we have the advent of "piracy," because all these years we've been monetizing the container. This is not an entirely new point, even for me - I've weighed in on this subject many times in the past. 

What I want to ponder - what I want all of us to ponder - is the conundrum facing both the producers of media and the companies that "support" them. We'll also look at some of the ways that these companies have failed to sufficiently understand the problem they're facing. 

How To Do SEO Write (And Not Be A Douchebag)

By James CurcioSome of what I say here are probably occult "secrets" that shouldn't be shared. Maybe I'm decreasing my "market value." I don't know. I just want to clue you in on just a few of the things I've picked up essentially living with a console of some sort glued to my nervous system for the last decade and a half. There are, generally speaking, three kinds of SEO. I'm going to talk about two of them here. The third is "black magic" and I'm not going to talk about it. At least, not yet. 
There's the kind of SEO that you learn as a part of web design.This is how I first learned it, officially. It is what tells you to create all of your "semantic" content in HTML, and keep all design elements as CSS and graphics. Why? So you don't confuse the search engines. It tells you to create a hierarchy of priority using things like page titles, meta tags, and header tags. It is actually not incredibly complicated. It shouldn't be. It's simply "best practices" designers should follow to make their sites easy to spider.
There is "SEO writing." This has two sides. 
The first is the writing element of what I just described: understanding how to format a document so that it is easiest for machines to parse. Hierarchy. Headers. Bullets. Proper image tags. Don't bury your key ideas inside some arcane table. Look at what words you use next to which words. Consider using but not overusing certain combinations of words, especially in regard to core concepts. 
The second is more complicated. This involves a mixture of timing, intuition, association, and having the kind of manic attention that can follow what thousands of people are saying at once. I'll talk about this last one first because it relates to the other three.