Been listening to a bunch of my 2 Tone ska stuff again — curse of being in one’s forties, I suppose. You dig out the music of your misspent youth. My favorite group was always The Beat (although, I’ll admit that I still think of them as The English Beat, as they were known here in the US). I loved other bands from the movement — The Specials, The Bodysnatchers, Madness — but none (for me) had the unimpeachable cool of The Beat. The Beat – “Mirror In The Bathroom.”

We’ll stick with the sad-old-bastard nostalgia for a moment. I heard this track again recently, and I was surprised at how little airplay it gets now. Olivia Newton-John was pretty much on constant pop radio rotation in the late-70s (along with the Bee-Gees), but (like the Bee-Gees), only a couple of songs appear to have made the “officially approved nostalgia playlist”, despite the popularity of her other stuff. This song is a great example — heard it *constantly* in 1979, and have barely heard it since. I unabashedly love this tune. Oliva Newton-John – “A Little More Love.”

A big part of my listening of late has been FAR WEST-related. I have a playlist of (good lord) nearly 700 tracks which I listen to as I work on the project, and that list is constantly growing as I discover new tracks, either on my own or suggested by fans. Here’s a couple of recent additions:

A track by a pair of Australian singers that appeared in the soundtrack to an episode of AMC’s western series HELL ON WHEELS, which immediately grabbed me: Kasey Chambers & Shane Nicholson – “Rattlin’ Bones.”

A very spaghetti-western-ish intro leads into a piece by the UK band The Heavy (best known over here for “How Ya Like Me Now?”), which I like quite a bit: The Heavy – “Short Change Hero.”

Here’s a piece that I’m slightly ashamed to say wormed its way into my brain via a commercial for Internet Explorer 9. A pop track with just the right amount of dubsteppy goodness added to it, from a London-based singer-songwriter. Alex Clare – “Too Close.”

And lastly, Slash has a new album coming out at the end of May, in collaboration with vocalist Myles Kennedy and his backing band The Conspirators, called “Apocalyptic Love.” The first single is getting pretty heavy rock radio play, and damned if it isn’t a nearly-perfect slice of “Use Your Illusion”-period Guns n’ Roses. I’m sorry… Axl who? Slash, feat. Myles Kennedy & The Conspirators: “You’re a Lie.”

There ya go, kids. See you next time.

1. It’s always good to realize that it’s not just you, that other people feel the same way and are going through the same things you are;
2. Some of these will undoubtedly inspire you towards your own efforts and ideas; and
3. Without the weight of studios behind us, we can all use some promotion, so we should share each other’s efforts whenever possible.

Darren Bousman (a fellow graduate of the Shawnee Mission School District) is a director, best known in Hollywood circles as the man behind three films in the Saw franchise. Among a smaller niche, however, he’s known as the producer and director of Repo! The Genetic Opera, the 2008 cult movie musical that mashes up horror, sci-fi and rock-opera (a favorite of mine).

Bousman teamed up with many of his co-creators from Repo! and has created The Devil’s Carnival, a short horror/musical that serves as the opening episode to an ongoing series. The trailer:

Hollywood, of course, had no idea what to do with this. The strange subject, the short running time, the future episodes, etc. — so Bousman and company decided to take the show on tour, themselves. He wrote a blog entry today about how it’s been going.

“This tour, this whole experience is a drug. And I can 100% with conviction tell you, as a filmmaker and artist, I am addicted… It fuels me… it keeps me wanting to fight. I am Popeye, and this is my spinach.

Gone are the days that we have to accept the fate handed down to us… If I can get into a van with 6 of my friends, and create what we have created, then so can anybody else…

Gone are the days where I bitch about lack of support, or ‘the man’. There is no man… There is only ME standing in front of MYSELF…

The only thing stopping people from seeing my films is ME…”

The tour rolls through the Kansas City area on the 5th of May, at a theater a stone’s through from Bousman’s old high school. I’ll be there.
 
 
Daniel Knauf was the creator of the amazing HBO series Carnivàle, which mixed gnostic mythology with the 1930s dustbowl… and carnies (noticing a theme here?). Cancelled two years into its proposed six-year run, it entered the all-too-long list of “strange wonderful things cancelled because they didn’t appeal to a mass audience.”

Now, Knauf has jumped into the realm of transmedia, with his new company, BXX. PBS has an interview with him, titled “Carnivàle Creator Bypasses Hollywood.”

His new effort, Haunted, is a fictional story that follows paranormal investigators working inside an abandoned house tormented by supernatural events, and is experienced via multimedia elements such as research documentation and investigators’ blogs, multi-camera video, and a navigational timeline allows viewers to manipulate how they view the story.

Knauf is trying to make internet-based entertainment more than just TV on a different screen, by experimenting with how a narrative can be delivered:

“The traditional entertainment industry is not known for their humility. They tend to think they are the end all. You don’t take a TV show and put it on Hulu and call it Internet content. No, it’s not. It’s a TV show you’re watching on your computer. Hulu’s not really Internet, Funny or Die is not really Internet; those are just TV being watched on a different screen. For me, I wanted to invent a narrative that there was absolutely no way you could have done it if the Internet wasn’t invented. That was the goal I set myself.

In the end, I just got tired of trying to convince them this lives and breathes on the Internet. I got tired of explaining finance models to them and I thought, let’s just do an inexpensive version of this and show them.”

The interview is worth reading, and touches on crowdfunding, audience building and more.

The ground continues to shift. Get out there and create.

Occasionally, though, something big happens — big enough to stick around for a bit, to make a splash outside of the creative community. Such an instance is the current Department of Justice suit against Apple and 5 of the Big 6 Publishers for collusion and price-fixing. The main result of this story has, to date, been the counter-offensive waged by the defendants’ Fellow Travelers — traditional media outlets, various proxy mouthpieces in blogs and such — all beating the “OMG AMAZON IS EEEEEEVIL” drum with the ferocity of a coked-up Gene Krupa. Pay no attention to the Collusion and Price Fixing behind the curtain — Look over there!

There’s been some push-back, though, in the form of some particularly insightful articles featured in today’s post.

Steve Windwalker has pretty much everything you need to know about the case, how we got here and where we’re headed in the lengthily-titled “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight: How Apple and 5 Big Publishers Almost Got Away with a Massive Price-Fixing Conspiracy to Try to Turn Back the Kindle Revolution, and What It Will Mean for Readers, Authors, and Publishers Going Forward.”

One of the points made in the article? The illegal collusion actually failed:

“On April 1, 2010, the day that the agency model went into effect for its proponents, there were 480,236 ebooks in the Kindle Store, and 23% of them were priced at $10 and up. As of April 15, 2012, the total Kindle catalogue had almost tripled, to 1,356,286, and fewer than 14% of those titles were priced at $10 and up. At that same point on Sunday, April 15, only three of the top 20 bestselling titles in the Kindle Store were published by the Defendants (two by Hachette and one by MacMillan), and two of those three were priced at under $8.

With trends like these, it’s probably fair to say that the agency model would have died, eventually, even without Dept. of Justice intervention. Apple’s failed iBookstore never grew to a point where it would have provided real cover for the Defendants if Amazon had called their bluff and started picking them off one at a time. By most accounts the iBookstore accounts for no more than 10% of the ebook market, and our anecdotal impression is that the Kindle App accounts for far more reading on the iPad and other Apple devices than iBooks. The Google books initiative that was touted (however ludicrously) as the savior of indie bookstores just a couple of years ago is dead.

One of the rich ironies in all of this is that the Defendants actually lost money by switching to the agency model.”

There’s a lot more there, including excerpts from the court documents. Well worth reading.

Eric Hellman has a look at how Amazon’s Web Services shows their corporate mindset rather clearly, and what that means when applied to publishing, in “Publishing’s Amazon-Powered Future.”

The killer take-away:

“The nightmare narrative being spun by the publishing echo chamber is tragically unaware of how Amazon works. Maybe it’s because publishers imagine that Amazon will do what they would do if they had Amazon’s market power. But Amazon won’t extort huge sums of money from powerless consumers. Instead, they will ruthlessly bring efficiency to every process involved in publishing. And then they’ll invite everyone to use their ruthlessly efficient services.

Just like Amazon Web Services have enabled thousands of scaleable web startups and has made thousands of established companies more efficient, I predict that Amazon Publishing Services will enable thousands of new publishers and make thousands of established publishers more efficient.”

This is especially obvious to those of us who were early adopters of digital publishing, and have the benefit of seeing the improvements that such efficiency has brought, over a period of time ranging from before the ‘Publishing Echo Chamber’ was even paying attention.

Guy LeCharles Gonzalez has an interesting post over on his blog, where he draws the comparison between ebooks and video games — with the Kindle as Steam, and Amazon as Valve:

Based on the steady increase in ebook sales over the past few years, it’s reasonable to conclude that the average reader doesn’t really care too much about DRM. They’re apparently bigger fans of the platforms Amazon, B&N, and to a lesser degree, Apple, have built to purchase and read ebooks, and the ebooks themselves don’t have the same emotional connection as those they buy in print to keep on bookshelves. As such, legitimately or not, from the consumers’ perspective, “lock-in” isn’t the factor many think it is, or desire it to be.

More importantly, though, beyond the shiny gadgets and apps, readers are fans of authors and genres (and, sometimes, even publishers), and while selection varies amongst the major e-tailers (especially Apple), there’s an interesting comparison to video games that I’ve been mulling over for a while now.

[...]

In console gaming, exclusive first-party titles are often among the perennial best-sellers (especially on Nintendo’s platforms), while third-party games fight it out for gamers’ limited time, attention, and disposable income. The biggest sellers often spawn successful franchises and spin-offs, but even more frequently, a ton of copycat, rip-off shovelware, similar to the mobile space where, pre-KDP, Apple successfully leveled the playing field for independent game developers and the app store has been flooded with me-too apps.

In PC gaming there’s a bit of a twist, where Valve’s Steam platform is effectively the Kindle, DRM included…”

It’s an eye-opening analogy — especially coming in a field where the biggest critics decry DRM and “walled gardens” like the iPad and the Kindle. It’s pretty evident that the consumer doesn’t really care about that as much as the critics do — and the example of console gaming is a pretty clear indicator.

As always, things are changing constantly — what’s true today may not be true down the road, and it is always in the best interest of an Insurgent Creative to know as much as they can, to be better able to react: Think big, be small, move fast.

Last night, the fine folks at Gen Con announced the 2012 Industry Insider Guests of Honor. I’m thrilled have been chosen this year — and incredibly honored to be listed along with such amazing company:

Tavis Allison
Steve Kenson
Mark Rein-Hagen
Wolgang Baur
T.S. Luikart
Elizabeth Shoemaker-Sampat
Stan!
Michelle Lyons
Dennis Detwiller
Ryan Macklin
Christina Stiles
James Ernest
Dominic McDowall-Thomas
George Strayton
Matt Forbeck
Jason Morningstar
Richard Thomas
Jess Hartley
Susan Morris
Rodney Thompson
Kenneth Hite
James Wyatt

GenCon will be putting together a list of panel discussions and seminars featuring us, in our varied areas of expertise. Once I have details about my specific events, I’ll post about them here. …And, once I have my schedule from the Guest-of-Honor track determined, I’ll then consider what additional events I may want to do as well — I guarantee, one way or the other, there will be a Far West panel with T.S. Luikart and myself.

The funny thing is, with T.S., Me and Dominic McDowall-Thomas all on the Guest of Honor list, staffing at the Cubicle 7 booth in the Exhibit Hall will have to make allowances for our regular absences! Luckily, my lovely wife Laura is managing the booth this year, and she’s a scheduling whiz.

We’re still almost 4 months out, but I’m starting to really look forward it.

For those of you who are new to the blog, Friday Music is a weekly series that I started in February 2005, which ran semi-regularly for a VERY long time. It is a weekly “Mixtape of The Internets”, where I post links to various songs that I’ve stumbled across in my meandering through various music blogs and such. I’m proud to say that it has resulted in a lot of people being introduced to a lot of good stuff, if the comments that I still get from time to time are any indication. Over the course of 2010/2011, I posted it less and less frequently, mostly because I wasn’t doing nearly as much crawling around music blogs. The last few were barely on a monthly schedule, and the last one was back in November.

So I’m giving it another go. This week’s entry:

The picture up there at the left is the Nashville-based Americana/Folk/Country duo, The Civil Wars, who are getting quite a buzz of late, winning Grammys and getting rave reviews from folks like Adele, who has called them the best live act in the world. This piece, the title track from their 2011 album, is a great piece of edgy folk harmony that currently sits in my FAR WEST playlist. The Civil Wars – “Barton Hollow.”

I was depressed to learn that Jun Seba, groundbreaking Japanese hip hop producer and DJ, who recorded under the name Nujabes, died in a car accident at the end of February. He was only 36. He’s probably best known in the US for his soundtrack work for the anime series Samurai Champloo (which was how I first heard him). Here’s a great track (with his Champloo collaborator, Shing02) which stands as a testament to his ability: Nujabes – “Luv (Sic) Part 3 (feat. Shing02)”

A friend of mine posted the video to this song on Facebook last month, and it was a total revelation for me. I literally had not thought of this song since the year of its release (back in 1987). I had absolutely loved this song, and then had completely forgotten about it. Hearing it again was like a door opening in my mind. Basia – “Time & Tide.”

Sticking with the nostalgia vibe for a moment longer, here’s a track from the musty back bins of the mid-90s. A nice little swing-jazz-hip-hop pop confection. The performer went on to become a hit songwriter for acts ranging from Britney Spears to Cee-Lo Green to The Pussycat Dolls. Lucas – “Lucas With The Lid Off.”

One of my favorite tracks from the soundtrack to my favorite console game, FIFA12. I’m a sucker for good dance music and synthpop, so this remix is, as the marketing douches say, “right in my wheelhouse.” Monarchy – “The Phoenix Alive (Kris Menace Remix).”

…and we’ll close out on another remix: One of my favorites, in fact. NSFW for lyrics. Notorious B.I.G. – “Party and Bullshit (Ratatat Remix).”

There ya go. Enjoy. If you have problems with any of the links, try copy-and-pasting. If you like what you hear, go buy the albums.

See you next week with more.

Turns out, though, that I really didn’t need to, as my friend John Rogers has written a brilliant blog entry over at his site, where he talks about his role in Mark Waid’s new digital comics initiative, and in the process covers pretty much everything I was planning to — including the same embeds I was going to include.

So, y’know… great minds, and all of that.

Head on over to John’s post, and absorb the serious Kung Fu Wisdom that he’s breaking down for you.

That? Right there? Adamant will be dipping our toes into that particular pool over the next 12 months or so. Initially as part of our FAR WEST project, but most likely expanding outward from there.

Of course, the increased use of Kickstarter has lead to a small problem: too much awesome. In the past few weeks, a number of really great projects have launched. I figured I’d take this opportunity to spread the signal a bit.

First off, my friend Tim Byrd is using Kickstarter to relaunch his pulp-inspired all-ages novel series, Doc Wilde, the first book of which was originally published by Penguin/Putnam. Here’s the video:

Second, the folks over at Evil Hat are producing a series of novels related to their Spirit of the Century neo-pulp property. They’ve got a Kickstarter up for the Dinopocalypse Trilogy, which is going gangbusters — so much so that they’ve “unlocked” additional books beyond the trilogy, featuring other heroes from the setting. Authors include Chuck Wendig, Brian Clevinger, C.E. Murphy, Harry Connoly and Stephen Blackmoore. The video:

Thirdly (see? I told ya — too much awesome), Academic super-researcher Jess Nevins (author of The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana and the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Pulp Heroes) is fundraising for a third volume, The Encyclopedia of Golden Age Superheroes. The video for his project:

And (you knew it was coming) fourthly, Darren Watts (formerly of HERO games and IPR) has a new company, Silverback Press, which is specifically dedicated to releasing games via Kickstarter. First up from him is Champions Live Action, a superhero LARP based on the much-beloved Champions RPG. The video:

…and there’s more coming every week. A revolution is occurring — one creating a world where creators go directly to their audiences to fund projects, gathering enthusiastic fans into an unstoppable force. It shows no signs of slowing. Kickstarter themselves are making more effort to reach out to the creative community: they’re doing an entire slate of events at PAX East this weekend, featuring demos from Kickstarter creators, panel discussions and more. Here’s hoping they decide to do the same at GenCon this August.

Lastly — I’ll take this opportunity to reward those of you who have read this entry all the way to the bottom to publicly announce that yes, Adamant will be launching another Kickstarter soon: More fiction, as part of our continuing FAR WEST property. Keep your eyes peeled for the official launch.

I see a lot of The Rocketeer in John Carter.

I’ve been a fan of the John Carter stories since I first read “A Princess of Mars” at age 11 or 12. My wife and I saw the midnight premiere of John Carter last night, in IMAX 3D — and despite reservations that I had, from awareness of the studio’s dumping the film in a traditional dead zone for releases which traditionally presages a dud that they’re looking to forget quickly, what I saw was a nearly perfect distillation of the themes and images that have been in my head for 30 years. Some changes were made, of course — such things are inevitable in film — but the changes (especially an updating of Dejah Thoris into a more active and capable character, while still maintaining her traditional allure) actually serve to make the film better than the source novel in some respects.

In many ways, it’s a bit like Peter Jackson’s Fellowship of the Ring in that way — a film that gets the look and feel of the work so very right, but with slight changes that make it a better film.

Of course, the press has passed judgement — they’ve read Disney’s intention (the neutering of the title, the early March release, the near-total lack of tie-in support), and, as ever eager to follow the lead of their betters, are lining up to belittle the film as gimmicky, one-dimensional, hokey, and even derivative. (Yes, a century-old story which influenced dozens of sci-fi blockbusters is now criticized as copying those blockbusters. This is the culture we’ve created, kids — welcome to it.)

Don’t believe it. John Carter is everything a Mars movie should be: mysterious, wondrous, exotic, thrilling, and filled with unabashed pulp heroism. Efforts like this should be rewarded.

The fans of NBC’s always-on-the-brink-of-cancellation Community have a saying: “Six seasons and a movie.” John Carter deserves a trilogy (at least) — but at this point it doesn’t look likely that it will even make back its budget on US box office. Which is a damned shame — because the lesson that Disney will learn from this is that films like this don’t make any money.

If you love science fiction, pulps, or just a good, old-fashioned tale of heroism, do your self a favor and go see this film, before it, like The Rocketeer before it, sinks out of view.

Now comes the last nail in the coffin — Gary Friedrich, the guy who created GHOST RIDER, is being made an example of by Marvel.

Friedrich brought suit against Marvel for a share of the money made by the first GHOST RIDER film — he didn’t see a penny from it. Everybody pretty much knew that this age of “Corporations are People” and “Money is Free Speech”, he had no chance in Hell, so it wasn’t surprising that he lost his case. Back when Gary worked for Marvel, they included a rights waver on your paycheck. That’s right: If you wanted to get paid, you had to endorse the check, which meant signing right below legal language that gave up the rights to anything you produced. Ethically bankrupt? Sure. Evil? Yes, I’ll even go there. But perfectly legal. So, naturally, Gary lost his case — he would see no money from the GHOST RIDER films, despite creating the character.

Marvel didn’t stop there, though. They countersued, and, outrageously, WON. Gary is now barred from making any money in association with the term or character “Ghost Rider” — which means he cannot do convention appearances as “the creator of Ghost Rider”, nor can he make any money from convention sketches, etc. In addition, the lawsuit hit him with a judgement that he owes Marvel $17,000 for past “merchandise sales.”

They cut the legs out from under a senior citizens SOLE source of income. If he can’t promote himself and make a living based on the character he created, what the hell is he supposed to do?

I don’t have words to express my fury. It is, as Bleeding Cool termed it, “the day that Marvel put a bullet in the head of Artists’ Alley.” Because make no mistake — this lawsuit will scare the shit out of convention organizers, who will (correctly) feel that they’re at risk of litigation by facilitating “unauthorized merchandise sales.” I expect to see policies barring original art sales at especially the big-prestige conventions soon.

So, I’m done. Marvel and DC will no longer get a cent of my money. No comics, no graphic novels, no books, no movies. Because it’s the only thing that the corporations understand — “money is speech”, after all.

If you’re interested in doing what you can to help Gary Friedrich, please visit Steve Niles’ fundraising page. Steve, the creator of 30 DAYS OF NIGHT, is taking Paypal donations for Gary, who is broke and in danger of losing his home by the end of the month because of the judgement against him. Please donate.

As for comics? I will try to continue my comics geekery via creator-owned works where possible — there’s a lot of good stuff out there, like Atomic Robo for example. Feel free to add your recommendations in the comments below.

Marvel and DC, though? Never again. The only way we’re going to stop corporate exploitation of creators is to stop enabling it. It may not be much, but I can’t contribute to it any more.

(Yeah, I know — my stress-metaphors don’t fuck around.)

The side effect of the cascade is that I’m constantly working with several projects which are all behind schedule — which makes working on each one that more difficult, due to the peculiarities of how my brain works. Logically, I know that if project A is the latest, I should knock that out until it’s done, and move on to project B, which is less late, then on to C, which is barely late. Somewhere in the misfiring neurons of my stress-addled mind, however, if I try to concentrate on A, then thoughts of B & C intrude, nagging at me almost to the point of panic. “We’re late,” they cry. “You need to get this done!” And so my work on A is like crawling over broken glass (see? I wasn’t kidding about the stress-metaphors). I often end up trying to bounce between projects to shut down the nagging, which of course doesn’t really do anything but slow down the completion process.

This is one of those things where working for yourself puts you at a disadvantage. I’m pretty sure if I had somebody telling me “DO PROJECT A.” I could concentrate purely on that — and then they could point me at the next task. Adamant, however, is a one-man shop, plus freelancers, co-developers, etc. Which means that everything bottlenecks through me, and I’m the guy standing over myself, giving the orders.

The result is 7-day work weeks, filled with 12-16 hour days. I can’t allow myself to unclench, to give myself any down-time, as long as there are projects which need work… and there are always projects which need work. Lack of down-time means that my immune system is stress-weakened, which often results in my getting slammed by whatever bug is going around, which has the added joy of making me feel even worse — and making my work even slower and the projects even later.

So it’s a failure of which I am exceedingly aware.

Folks ping me all the time, though — via social media, email, forums, etc. Fans, for the most part. Enthusiastic. “When is X coming out? Is it out yet? When? How about now? I’m dying over here! Now? Come on!”

On the one hand, I know this is a positive thing. People look forward to the stuff I release. They want it. This is, of course, far better than the alternative — that they don’t care or don’t even notice.

On the other hand, though? A gut-twisting knife, every time. Seriously — actual physical discomfort. A stark reminder of my failing. Massive injections of additional pressure and stress …and I know it’s not intended to be that. It’s genuine interest from genuine fans, and I absolutely hate that my brain has managed to turn that into a negative thing.

So I end up using my lunch break to write out a blog post like this, in the hopes that putting it down in black-and-white will force my mind to stop doing that.

How about you folks? How do you keep from falling behind (or whatever your own personal failing may be)? How do you hack your own brain to stop responding in ways that are detrimental to your work?