Tales From When I Had A Face: Intro

Here’s your chance to read the intro to the illustrated novel we’ve been working on for 3 years. I predict we’ll be read to publish – if we find the right publishing partner – in 2018. We’re working very hard at this to build a rich fantasy world that feels like it comes from original folklore, that ties into dreams and visions glimpsed in the first Fallen Cycle book.

In the meantime… check this out. And let us know what you think!

The Fallen Cycle: A battle between the light of remembrance and dark of forgetting, the burden of tradition, and the cost of progress. A war waged with stories and magic as well as guns and swords. 

All It Takes Is The Right Story. Mythos Media

Gravity of the Past

These are all thoughts and reflections on some related ideas as I continue to work on the next Fallen Cycle book, Tales From When I Had A Face:

"It seems strange, but I think so. We experience time; it is merely space being made for a story, like an indentation in our being. But maybe the problem is finding /that/ story. Colliding with that right one at the right time. You have to know the past to know the present. When our lives overlap, it is not an unbroken line but instead overlapping ripples. In a sense, everything happens at once. In another, there is nothing that happened, except the remaining story, peeking out like fossils after a rockslide.
They say Gran Nadja fell hands over feet in the forest, and they burned in that starving ice, burned like fire. Running for a clearing, a desolate field with a lone tree at its center. She looks to the sky and sees her granddaughter, her granddaughter who will carry the fire of her light, but in her, that Nadja, the fire will one day burn all the brighter. That thought keeps her going, it warms her, saves her from frostbite, and it is not wishful thinking it is What Is To Be. She cannot die, just as those who have no Life Bearer are cursed to die and see that fire extinguished. She cannot die. She must push on. Because after all, doesn’t she have a granddaughter named after her, and isn’t she to be her Voice to the new world? It is, so it must be. The pain of broken ribs, and worse, suddenly didn’t seem so bad. She would have her revenge, a razor edge, not honed but cracked from a blunt whole in one single stroke, like obsidian: me. 

The void was given a shape.
It was given her name.
But it did not yet know itself. 

You need only the will to peer between the cracks in your fingers as you drift toward the blinding light at the end of that corridor, your heart shuddering offbeat triplets in its broken cage to find the real secret that this invisible Snipe has for you, wedged between the bloody thicket of every noun, character, tone shift. The only secret. Regurgitated, mouth to mouth—you do know that mythos means “by mouth,” yes? Stories only matter because we are made of them. They have to out. And with every word, breath, image, we are not conveying a fiction, but passing on something more vital."

--

What is the point in trying to reclaim a lost past? If we look back we’d end up like Lot’s wife. But sometimes you reach such an impasse that the only way forward is to go back. It’s one of the peculiarities of some people that for them everything is backwards. For those wired in reverse, we already know how the story will end — and who doesn’t? death, despair, loss — but we want to work backwards toward a halcyon beginning, a Garden of Eden bordello. But the road to the past is asymptotic, so not even Atlas can bear the burden of truly fresh starts. Every day the past takes a little more of you, like a homunculus perched atop your diaphragm, gloating with a broken smile. The ugly little dwarf. He’s breaking you down. Filling your head with daydreams of a backwards Eden that gradually makes the approaching death seem pleasant. There isn’t any other way out of this thing. Beginnings are forever out of reach.

--

I don't think you really choose what gravity a past or event has on you. Just because you've stopped thinking about it doesn't mean it's not there, determining everything that will be.

Beginnings and ends to life (birth and death, specifically) don't exist as they are. They exert an invisible effect from some hidden vantage point that can never be directly encountered. Gravity is the most apt metaphor I can find.

I've yet to find any kind of freedom from the past -- whether moving across the map or burning everything and 'starting over', sure I've done that plenty, more than most (not by choice), but again none of that is a beginning. It's all a part of the middle of life. We really know nothing of fresh starts because we're always already ourselves.

--

Check out the first at Party At The World's End.

[Take a Trip with us... Mythos Media.]

A Dark Modern Fairy Tale

Now, for those that don't want the print version, the eBook version is available through Scribd, full color. 8 pgs of this unique illustrated story is free, full version $2.99.

Included after the fold, additional concept art and sketches from the contributing artists (credits on cover):

Fantasy Sci - Fi Creative Commons Setting

Though it is still in development, the "world setting document" for the Altaeron fantasy / sci-fi setting has been opened to the public to explore - and possibly contribute to.

Check Out The Google Document.

Astute readers may notice that all of Mythos Media's fictional work thusfar constitutes a sort of repository of ancient pre- pre- history for this genre-blending setting. 

[Take a Trip with us... Mythos Media.]

Fairy Tale Journeys: Storytelling, Media & Framing

 By Mr. VI

Do me a favour and think about beginnings, would you?

Specifically, think about that moment, that gap before you start something new - the moment; that breath you take before you begin to speak, when you're moving thought into speech.or idea into movement.

Think about reaching out to grasp something, maybe picking up that mug of tea or coffee, or perhaps closing your hand around something and lifting it. Moving it from one place to another. Most of us us don't think about such things, which is why I ask it of you as a favour.

After all, there's a lot that you do without thinking, and I don't know if for you, the reader, it's simply habit or muscle memory that carries you through life. I don't know how you move when you walk, how the weight of your body feels as you plant one foot in  front of the other, how it shifts as you're increasing speed, as you're avoiding obstacles.

I don't know what kind of joy you take in getting to where you want to go, and I certainly couldn't guess how you'll feel after a day on your feet, doing all that you need to, day after day, minute after minute, hour after hour.

More to the point, I don't know what it's like to begin to walk, while your mind is on other things - to just blithely amble along. You probably didn't know either, until I asked you to think about it, as a beginning.

I asked you this favour because I don't know any of that, and nor will I ever do so. I can't go for a stroll, for a jog, for a run - there's no sidling, no sashaying; no hopping, skipping and jumping. No hopscotch, no tag, no home runs, no tries, no touchdowns.

I'm curious, you see. So do me a favour and think about beginnings, about the transition between not walking, and walking. Between silence and speech, and thought and action.

I can't walk.

The Story of a Transmedia Revolution: (Part 2) The Story Wars

The Rise and Fall of a Story-Showing Empire

By Peter Usagi

The Transmedia Revolution has begun!
Which side will you join?
An empire of greedy corporate media cartels?
Or an ancient and mysterious order of storytellers...
Image via Panicposters

After years of study, I've come to realize that contemporary storytelling—books, film, television (and to a significant extent, even live theater)—are a completely passive medium.  They are narratives that lack interaction and any kind of participation from their audience.  These mass-produced mediums of entertainment are more appropriately labeled "story-showing,” then storytelling.

People often wonder why there isn’t anything "new" in Hollywood.  Why is it that every movie, TV show, and most popular literature, tastes like reheated "leftovers" disguised with some kind of mystery sauce?  It’s because after a century of industrialization, we've become indoctrinated as a species of “story consumers.”

We’ve been raised to passively swallow the shallow narratives presented to us in our extended childhoods; schizophrenic mythologies filled with stories that have no depth, meaning, or purpose--other than to entertain (or perhaps more sinisterly, distract).

All of our modern entertainment (all of our stories) are almost entirely mono-active.

Our “entertainment industry” is simply a convenient medium for a 24/7 multimedia stream of consumer subconsciousness—peppered every fifteen minutes with commercials, product placement, and other forms of materialist propaganda.  Even traditional literature has become a victim to this malaise.  

The Lost Art of Storytelling

Parents who "tell” stories to their children, usually aren't really “telling” them.  They’re reading them word for word from a book; an example of modern mono-active story-watching.  Unless the child occasionally takes control of the narrative, thus making it interactive (I.E. "No, Red Riding Hood had a cell phone, and she called the cops on that mean nasty wolf!") the true immersive, and transitive aspects of storytelling are neutered, or even entirely absent in our modern fictions.

Is modern media a "big bad wolf" that
devours creativity and imagination?
Image via Wikipedia

If you put your book down, and “tell” a story to your audience (instead of read it), something about your story will always change, each and every time you tell it.  Unless, of course (as you’ll find in live theater), you have your lines memorized.

This is because even when you tell the same story (with the identical characters and plot),  you’ll always be a different person each time you tell it, and so will your audience (even if they’re the same people):

If you told a story to a group of recent college grads (while they were partying around a campfire in the middle of the wilderness) the crazy things you did to get into your career field…would that story be identical to the one you told to a classroom of second graders, the day after you lost your job?

If this is the case, does "storytelling" in its interactive sense, still exist in today's society?  Perhaps...

Thanks to new combinations of divergent media platforms, a new kind of storytelling is on the rise.  One that recognizes the importance of engaging an increasingly distracted and impatient audience: transmedia.

Modern Myths in Final Conflicts

By Wes Unruh
While fairy tales like Red Riding Hood may historically be better indicators of psychological tendencies within a people than the more traditional myths of a civilization, I tend to think the division is tragic. We are always somewhat separate from our gods, but the urban legends all happened to a friend of a friend's cousin. Same with fairy tales - the stories are the narratives that people use to flesh out the world around them - the farther away the space they are mapping, the more surreal and empowered the hero, the more archetypal the expression.

Now we ourselves are journeying to the darkest spaces of the planet with diodes and halogen bulbs, scanning the earth itself with orbital satellite platforms, a technologically empowered ghost dance chasing every last spirit, for good or ill, deeper into the core of the earth (picture Agartha overrun with fables seeking shelter from the mundane accountant). It's been said if god did not exist we would have to invent her. I'm pretty sure that's been said, at least - the same goes for all myths - if they don't yet exist, sooner or later someone will speak it, seek to express that archetype in narrative, that it might be apprehended, toughened up, and brought into conversational space.

We cannot parse our existence without narrative - even if that narrative is implied. When we hear of something spilling out from the crawling chaos of our own psyche, it can only appear in divine or demonic forms until we understand it - and even then it gets iffy. When I read about the 'central nervous system for the earth' I immediately think of Gaia, first the goddess and secondly the planet in Asimov's Foundation meta-novel - and I suspect I'm not the only one who sees the shadow of Skynet as a kind of distant third. Myth-making with archetypes is a fundamental expression of sign-wielding cognition, a 'here-there-be-dragons' kind of filling in the gaps, that helps reality stabilize for a society.

Unfortunately, our current global situation seems to be a clashing of archetypal expression preventing true communication. Our world's biggest belief systems most extreme fundamentalists are all obsessively focused on the Temple Mount and the end of the world. Or more precisely, ending the world. Every time someone says they can't wait for the Second Coming of Christ, they're publicly expressing the desire to see the world come to an end. Give them a good hard slap in the face - it may not wake them out of their trance, but it will give them the slightest taste of the sheer magnitude of harm they are wishing upon the rest of the planet, not to mention the blood which has already been spilled in the name of the Kingdom of G-d.

Perhaps the new modern myths will not be myths of distance, or of the huge archetypal forces moving just beyond the liminal, almost formless yet manifest... the new modern myths will be more like fairy tales, urban legends, and cross-cultural movements of signification. The days of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity squabbling over the Dome of the Rock in the hopes of kickstartering up an armeggedon so the thousand year reign of Christ can begin once the Dajjal's armies of djinn and demons have been put down are almost over.



This is the myth of the far-away god that kills, a powerful myth that persisted for years, but didn't become apocalyptic until the myth-forms themselves sensed the encroachment into their space of the 'thought-at-a-distance' technologies of the telegraph, the radio, and finally the satellite. With the telegraph came the refinements in notions of the Rapture, with Sputnik and the Space Race Hal Lindsey conceived of and exposed 'The Late Great Planet Earth' planting armeggedonist dispensationalism into conservative politics and linking the modern state of Israel with the violence described in the Revelation of St. John the Divine.



In opposition to this traditionalist nationalist view of history, we're seeing the rise of the borderless state and the collective mind, a cybernetic enhancement assimilating (borg-like) all of the world into a new cognitive model of networked spaces. With this new virtual state, we see a different kind of archetypal force moving (as promised) against the God who kills from the skies with fire. The new world order will be all of us, illuminati each and every one, creating environments about us as we grow off world, or it'll be a cannibalistic holocaust, something very Soylent Green, perhaps. I don't think it will be the final expression of Islam OR Christianity - if anything, we appear to be smack dab in the middle of the Kali Yuga, having completely externalized every aspect of the human body (hence the above central nervous system of the earth) and that from here on out it's all going to be the rising sun of the golden age. I'm not saying we are the new modern myths, but rather the idea that we are the new myths is a new, modern myth - and it is shaping who we are becoming.



...oh, and a very happy birthday to the dead Dr. Seuss.

Pre-order a copy of The Immanence of Myth, published by Weaponized in July 2011.