Exciting times at Supraterranean! Last weekend we launched a new micro-site called Oneirisms, which was conceived as a public dream journal. Once we got around to developing the site, we decided that it would be open to both dreams and visions from waking life.

The idea for the site came while reading Joseph Campbell’s book The Hero With a Thousand Faces, in which he uses the dreams of real people to help explains myths from throughout human history.

You can find more information on the About page, or just go straight to the Submissions page and send us your dream!

In other news, the submission form on Supraterranean has been renovated and is now fully operational. Please consider trying it out to send in your creative work!

- Nick Meador
Founder
Supraterranean

View Our New Micro-Site for Dreams and Visions at Supraterranean

Many things are happening around here! If you haven’t heard, I wrote an essay called “A Supraterranean Manifesto” that was published by the web magazine Reality Sandwich on 7/16/10. In it I explain how the site came to fruition and also my vision for why the site matters. Please check it out, comment, and pass the link around!

The second bit of news is that I just built a Map page using the Geo Mashup plugin for WordPress. On that map you can see icons for any posts with geotag info. Since contributors are located all over the world, this presents an interesting opportunity to see where creative work is coming from!

Finally, if you or someone you know is interested in advertising on Supraterranean, you can find information on the new Sponsors page.

Nick Meador
Supraterranean founder

View ‘A Supraterranean Manifesto’ and the New Map View at Supraterranean

Throughout the web 2.0 boom of the early 21st century, people have had an increasing number of ways to express themselves online. Easier access to creative software, skyrocketing Internet speeds, and worldwide social networking sites have all, in their own way, contributed to this phenomenon. It’s now commonplace to share photos, videos and music online, either in a community or on a blog.

Finding new ways to share written work online has been a slower process, partly because the technology is still in a state of flux. E-readers are bursting onto the market in 2010, but many have already grown accustomed to reading on an over-sized cell phone screen.

Supraterranean was founded in 2008 with the primary goal of encouraging personal expression and creative growth, using the various tools offered on the Internet. Over the past two years, contributors have self-published many kinds of creative work: stories, photographs, experimental videos, poems and more. With no editorial selection system, contributors are free to share their work with the public immediately ­– to strike out on their own creative journey unimpeded.

Now the website is taking a leap forward with the launch of Supraterranean Books, which will publish its first e-book on July 6, 2010. The collection of early works by Supraterranean founder Nick Meador is titled Seeking the Upward Spiral. It contains just more than 300 pages of stories (two of which were previously unpublished), essays and poems hand-picked by the author. Meador also wrote an introduction detailing his creative efforts since starting to write in 2005.

The e-book will first be made available in PDF form using a “pay what you want” system of voluntary donations. Later on it will be distributed in the iBookstore, Kindle Store, and other e-book retailers, and also on Supraterranean in other file formats such as TXT and RTF. With so many different options for reading digital work, the goal is to provide the e-book in as many formats as possible.

This is an exciting time for self-publishing and creative expression in general. Over the past two years, Supraterranean has been committed to reinventing the established publishing model. The walls that once had to be climbed to release a book have largely crumbled, opening a new realm that we can now explore together. It’s up to us to show that freedom is expression.

Visit supraterranean.com/books/ or email books[at]supraterranean.com for more information.

View ‘Seeking the Upward Spiral’ E-book Available 7/6 at Supraterranean

I’m proud to announce the launch of a fourth blog on Supraterranean. The Thumpme blog started at WordPress.com at the beginning of June. A couple of weeks ago, I invited the author to cross-post on Supraterranean. The blogger agreed, under a condition of anonymity. Here’s the brief run down:

“Between now and December 25, 2010, I’m going to immerse myself in the wispy pages of the bible, running from front to back, Old Testament to New.”

You can read about the blog on the About page, or just access the front page at supraterranean.com/thumpme.

In other news, the e-book “Seeking the Upward Spiral” is set for PDF release on Tuesday, July 6. You can find it then at the Books page.

View Launching a Fourth Blog at Supraterranean

However, that doesn’t mean I can’t do something out of the ordinary. The time has come for Supraterranean to become a service for self-publishing e-books. I’ve decided to create and release a compilation of my work, containing various writings that I’ve self-published over the past four years. It’s tentatively called The Initiation Rites of a Self-Realist, and I plan to release it by early July. UPDATE 6/23/10: After realizing that the term “self-realist” doesn’t make any sense, I changed the title to Seeking the Upward Spiral. The exact release date is still TBD but will definitely be in early July.

The collection will run just longer than 290 pages and contain about 100,000 words of stories, essays and poems. I’ve written a foreword to explain what the collection means to me, so I won’t get into that here. Let me just say that I’m extremely excited to begin a new chapter at Supraterranean. I intend to provide resources to help contributors do the same.

No longer will we let the traditional book publishers and newspaper critics put self-publishing in a bad light. Their industries are failing because of all the flaws they were never willing to address. Now it’s our turn.

I’ll be offering my e-book for free as a PDF, TXT and other formats, all with Creative Commons licenses. I’ll use a “pay what you want” system so that people can make donations as they see fit. Then I’ll post it on e-book torrent sites and find out how to submit it to the iTunes store, Amazon.com and other online bookstores.

Someday maybe Supraterranean will also be a service for printing small batches of paper books, though I’m extremely tentative to even consider that since it inevitably leads to some unnecessary waste. We’ll see. For now, it’s time to develop new ways to distribute our creative work for people to use at their convenience, whether on an e-reader or a traditional computer screen. I hope you’ll be pleased with the results.

View Upcoming E-Book Release at Supraterranean

I’ve created a form for us to use, as well as a new Submission Form page. That page is currently accessible by links in the sidebar (the “Supra-what?” box) and on the Submit page. For now, please compose your submission on your computer and then copy and paste into the form. When I tried it the preview function didn’t seem to work, and there was no confirmation upon submission. However, the form did succeed in creating a draft post, so don’t you worry about that!

As always, you can still send submissions to submit[at]supraterranean.com. I’m just hoping this will expedite the posting process — that is, if I start receiving more submissions! The incoming flow has been pretty slow lately. That’s understandable though, since I was out of commission for almost a month while I moved out of the country.

If you already have a contributor account, please log in before using the Submission Form (the link is always in the site footer). If you prefer the WordPress editing screen (which contains a lot more fine-tuned controls), feel free to create your drafts that way. If you don’t yet have a contributor account and you’d like one, just email me at admin[at]supraterranean.com.

View The New Open Submission Form at Supraterranean

Things were pretty hectic while I prepared to move to St Kitts. I arrived a week ago and the chaos continued. Now I at least have Internet in my apartment, where I’ll be doing most of my work.

The image you see is the view from our porch, overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. So for now — and potentially just more than two years — the Supraterranean headquarters will be located on a hilltop in the Caribbean.

After nearly three weeks of inactivity on Supraterranean, I plan on having a new issue ready for you on Monday, May 17. Stay tuned for developments once I get more settled in my new home.

View Headquarters Moved at Supraterranean

In other news, I’m about to move to St. Kitts, an island in the Caribbean where my girlfriend is attending vet school at Ross University. I leave on May 7, a week from Friday. Since the next two weeks are bound to be chaotic, I can’t guarantee that I’ll be posting new content. However, things should be running as normal on the blogs, so look there for action. Thanks for your paaaaaaaatience and understanding.

View Audio Podcast Launch and Two-Week Hiatus at Supraterranean

Things are changing so fast at Supraterranean these days. Two months ago we launched the Prana Genius blog. Now I’m pleased to introduce our third blog, Flux Window, which will be run by Michigan native Jacob Rendell. He’ll be blogging about live media, graphic design and visual research. So far we just have a welcome post over there, but feel free to leave a comment as a “house warming” present for Jacob.

In other news, I’m trying out a new donations plugin the that will display specific fundraising goals on the Support page. The first priority is to pay our hosting fees for 2010. Please consider making a donation with the secure PayPal button. In the future we’ll have a voluntary subscription option, sort of like membership fees for NPR or your local public broadcasting station. And at any time you can make a general donation with the button in the sidebar. The goal is to minimize the amount of ads on the site. Currently there is only one, at the bottom of the sidebar in article view.

There are still many developments to come! Soon anyone will be able to create a draft post, regardless of whether they have an account. And I’m going to be creating a wiki section with user guides. Don’t forget about the new video podcast either.

Also, I mentioned how the contributor emails would soon stop. For better or worse, that has to happen immediately. I accidentally deleted my contributor email list. So please either subscribe to the Site News RSS Feed or become a fan on the Facebook page. Thanks!

View A New Blog, and a New Way to Show Support at Supraterranean

A landmark event for Supraterranean happened late Tuesday night, but I was in such a rush that I didn’t make an appropriate announcement. Many of you know that visual artist Kaliptus has joined us by starting the Prana Genius blog. He also runs the Tryptophanatic Netvision channel on Vimeo.com, a stylish video hosting/social networking site that’s quickly gaining popularity in creative crowds.

Through my conversations with Kaliptus, we started brainstorming many ideas for taking Supraterranean to the next level. One idea was to create a podcast with interviews and other interesting content. I have that pretty much ready to go — now we just need to make some episodes.

In the meantime, we have launched the Tryptophanatic Netvision video podcast! This podcast will feature the same kind of experimental animations that appear on the Vimeo channel, only you’ll be able to subscribe to the podcast, download episodes, and watch them wherever you want: your computer, your TV, your mobile device, etc. There will also be new content that’s exclusive to this podcast. Furthermore, the podcast will come in a higher resolution than Vimeo provides — and therefore, higher resolution than when they appear on Supraterranean.

You can access the podcast a few different ways. The most common is to search for “supraterranean” or “tryptophanatic” in the iTunes store (click here to be taken to the podcast in iTunes). Alternatively, you can subscribe to the podcast as an RSS feed. And we’ll provide a link straight to the “Tryptophanatic Podcast” category, in case you’d prefer to browse through the videos right on Supraterranean (where you can also download the episodes as MP4 files).

This marks a new chapter for Supraterranean. We have more blogs on the way, in addition to the forthcoming audio podcast. Please let me know your thoughts!

View The New ‘Tryptophanatic Netvision’ Video Podcast at Supraterranean