The Voodoo Viewpoint: Is new media stealing our souls and our memories?

Originally posted on lisascullard.wordpress.com

I haven’t blogged for a while, having had new things to deal with through the summer and autumn along with writing, and waiting for other things to be resolved – everyday life has got in the way, and all of it worthy of my time – so I can honestly say I don’t feel I’ve missed anything by not procrastinating online too much.

This post has been on my mind for a while over the past year, and I’ve turning it over further in my mind since a topic came up on Facebook regarding the well-roasted old chestnut of ebook vs. print books, and what might supplant them in the future. When I made my comment, I didn’t realise how much of an observation it really was. But the thought of it keeps returning to me, so I’ll attempt to dissect it further now. (I’ve used ‘Voodoo’ in the title as I was originally going to post it as Voodoo Spice first – but there is another relevance to the reference).

My comment on the post was:

I think real books will stick around for another reason – the same reason as real music disc collections, and real movie DVDs, and real photo albums. The death of these things will mean the end of being able to remember lost loved ones. Imagine going into an elderly relative’s last residence, and instead of shelves full of their favourite media that you can pick up and read and smell, and admire, all that’s there is a computer tablet full of password-protected cloud-storage erotica. Supposing they’re survived by 20+ family members all wanting a memento? Will they have to take turns hacking into his or her tablet to read their, erm, favourites???

It’s not only the issue of having physical objects with which to remember a loved one, though. When you first make a new friend, visit their home for the first time, you see immediately by their books, music, film collections, and photographs what you have in common. Without those, it takes far longer to define. How you learn about a person who wears nothing on their sleeve in real life? Are they hiding something about their personality, their cultural and entertainment tastes, behind password-protected anonymous digital storage products? How much of their social media persona is genuine – do they really like Top Gear, or do they just ‘Like’ it on Facebook? How long does it take to make early judgements of compatibility when all you see in their home is the faceless packaging and housing of technology? Is this creating the hacking, snooping, prying, suspicious culture that troubles present-day relationships?

Are we sacrificing our personalities, our ability to connect with one another in real life without the social media screens, in favour of electronic packaging?

Back to the subject of bereavement and memories, there is another agenda surfacing to consider.

Electronic media itself has no re-sale value. The tablets and electronic devices can be re-sold, but they lose value in the very short term. Unlike physical books, vinyls, cassettes, picture frames, CDs, and DVDs – when you buy anything in digital format, to watch, read or listen to, its solvency value is zero. So even if your descendants, friends and family don’t want to share the digital tablet and know your passwords to enjoy your *ahem* favourites, they can only sell the tablet itself. Even if you have bought 70,000 books, movies, and songs in your lifetime, they do not add up to £70,000 worth of house clearance on ebay to divide among the mourners. They add up to zero.

They money you spend on electronic books and media to fill your device has gone for good. You cannot donate the products to an Oxfam bookshop after you have enjoyed them in order for others to benefit. You cannot have a yard sale or a car boot fair stand of portable entertainment to fund a party, or to pay a few bills. You have not invested your money in anything physically reminiscent that can be enjoyed as part of the soul of a lost loved one, or liquidated as an asset in the future.

The money has gone for good, into the great black hole of the business that also sold you the device to enjoy it on, or to store in some online cloud.

So in the future, without personal possessions for family and friends to remember us by – not even the chance to flick through the same books and photo albums we held, and no idea how to access our family photographs and music – and more and more social lives being conducted online – how will anyone remember their grandparents and great-grandparents beyond faces on a screen?

Will the youngest family members have the sense of identity and individual heritage that children before the digital age grew up with?

Will old people just die and disappear, leaving nothing behind but an online account full of media they spent thousands on, which is worth precisely nothing to their descendants even if they have the ability to access it? Will their living memories and personalities evaporate the second you tap on ‘Confirm shut down/log off device’?

Will folk start leaving clauses on their departure, that no-one is to hack into the tablet at all to avoid finding out how much porn and erotica they downloaded to keep them warm in their old age?

Never mind what to do with Granny, the last Will and Testament says we have to burn her Kindle first… aptly named device, if ever there was one. I see a new business opportunity looming – the “Kindle Crematorium” where dirty old reading habits go after you die…

It’s a mystery that leaves me very curious. I already find houses without books, music, photograph or film collections very odd – rather like pictures of home interiors in advertising, with no identity of the occupants visible. Sterile, like a showroom to sell a product or furniture lifestyle – not a working, living home. And if that is what remains in the future, when individuals die, what is left to know of them? An indentation in the sofa, perhaps – where they sat while playing Candy Crush Saga online?

So never mind that a computer tablet doesn’t provide the same decorative impact as a bookshelf, or provide the same soundproofing from your neighbours. Never mind that it’s a good way of hiding your reading habits, and a bad way of storing your nekkid selfies. It’s also a good way of spending your children’s inheritance – permanently. Throwing your small change onto the Kindle Fire (literally), never, ever to return as second-hand small change, ever again. Quite possibly thrown away along with the material potential for any of your descendants to remember you for more than one surviving generation…

HHappy Halloween! :) xxx

IIf you want to learn to how to format a print-on-demand book, publish and distribute for free, click here for my tutorial. You can also learn how to format ebooks and multimedia books. If those still light your candle ;) x

The Voodoo View - Women in the Media (continued...)

Original vehicle signage, with instructions for use scrawled on by Inspector Helen Bourne Tagart, Aide de Camp for Commandant Mary Sophia Allen

Last blog on here, I had a good rant about the current spate of whining by pro-feminists complaining that women's voices aren't 'out there' in the mainstream media.

Above is an example of the mountain of stuff kept by former suffragette and Commandant of the Women's Auxiliary Police Force/vigilante/Hicks-botherer, Commandant Mary Sophia Allen. This mountain of stuff, packed none-too-neatly in a travelling trunk stamped HBT, for her second-in-command and long-term love interest Helen Tagart, contains news cuttings, letters, admins, booklets, posters, diaries, photographs, reports, autographs of various dictators she visited (with her usual shiny-boot-wearing uniformed buffoonery, to the general embarrassment of the British government), receipts, invoices and various other hoarder's guff that you would expect someone with minor OCD and a bit of professional narcissism to collate in their own lifetime.

This overload of insight has been entrusted to me to scan by her great-great-grand-nephews/nieces who have kept it stored away for the last half a century or more, and to consider using it for an authorised feature film project on their behalf about the well-meaning women's rights activist and anti-slavery awareness promoter, Miss Allen.

So far I'm about 25-30 hours into scanning and typing up anything handwritten, I'm up to 467 images, and only about a third of the way through it all.

What's clear so far is the sheer volume of women's monopoly over stories, writing and reviews in the media during the First and Second World War. Miss Allen subscribed to all the regional and international news clipping agencies, meaning that wherever her name was mentioned in the world, she was sent the original clipping - whether it was from Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Germany, Italy or Brazil. She would appear in the UK press on a daily basis. I've just spent three hours scanning cuttings from the middle of 1934 alone.

The woman damn near invented 'Googling yourself' before such a thing was conceivable.

But it's not just her own publications, letters and articles that meant women were represented in the press. Here's a review from a Leicester newspaper of her book 'Women at the Crossroads'.

Leicester Daily Mercury, 29 June 1934, review by Anna Bell of Commandant Mary Allen's book

Notice anything? Yes. The reviewer was also a woman - Anna Bell. With her name in a big old font too.

It's not an isolated incident...

John O'London's Weekly, 9 June 1934, review by Sylvia Lynd of 'Women at the Crossroads' by Mary Sophia Allen

Again, note the prominence of the reviewer's name and font size in the article above.

Aha, I hear you say. But I expect the men still had the upper hand, yes? I bet their reviews were published with their names above the book title and author's name, in an even bigger font!

Okay. Let's have a look at the reverse of the above cutting, in the John O'London's Weekly reviews:

John O'London's Weekly, 9 June 1934, review by Horace Thorogood of 'Short Stories, Scraps and Shavings' by George Bernard Shaw

Well, guess what? This piddling single column review on the right, of the esteemed George Bernard Shaw's collection of short stories, doesn't even have a full title, or Mr Shaw's full author name mentioned. The photograph is of neither the author or reviewer - it's of G.K. Chesterton, rumoured to have been caricatured by Shaw in one of his tales. And the name of the reviewer himself, Mr Horace Thorogood, bless him, only appears at the very bottom of the piece - in a font that you could easily read with an electron microscope at your disposal.

Note the partial article on the left, alongside Horace Thorogood's trivial offering. Bigger heading, bigger fonts, more columns - only a pity that Mary Allen's collecting of clippings didn't run to full pages. It's a review of 'Valleys of the Assassins' by Freya Stark, who as you can see from this tantalising snippet was apparently a bit of a Lady Lara Croft-type. She was inspired in her childhood by reading 'The Thousand and One Nights'. On her travels, she learned of other inspiring women, such as "...the story of Qadam Kheir, a lady of the Kulivand of Tarhan, who fought against the government... She was a beautiful woman, and married to her cousin.* They used to go out together to fight, and she could shoot from horseback like a man."

*(NB: Marrying one's cousin is not a prerequisite for pro-feminism)

According to Wiki, Freya Stark died in 1993, aged 100 years old. I expect she was pleased that she hadn't sat knitting and baking cupcakes for the first half of her life...

But I'm digressing. Anyway, what I'm illustrating, by the examples above, is that women got all the big splashy stories and reviews and attention-grabbing headlines in the 1930s. Men, like the unworthy George Bernard Shaw and Horace Thorogood, got shoved into small fonts and margins.

Makes you wonder what the gender of the editors and typesetters were at the time too.

I expect the male editors and typesetters were all away, peeling turnips in the trenches and stuff, or pushing up the daisies after last time.

However, in her review, Sylvia Lynd quotes Mary Allen's writing at the time in 1934, who feared that women were taking their 'new opportunities' too lightly and for granted:

'They have made little, she thinks, of their opportunities since they became voters. Are they able, "with their superior bodily health and mental training" she asks, to accomplish anything that their grandmothers could not do?'

Sylvia Lynd retaliates and points out that women had plenty at the time in 1934 to take pride in, including the Women's Institute and other societies that promoted health, welfare, comradeship, and prevented 'mental anarchy' in British culture.

Not to mention the ability to shove George Bernard Shaw and poor Mr Horace Thorogood into a smaller column of the newspaper.

But like Mary Allen was saying in 1934, today in 2014, eighty years on, those things like the ability to vote, knit a Women's Institute flag, bake a non-anarchist Victoria Sponge, and belittle the menfolk, aren't enough to satisfy the alpha-females among us.

Today, women want to be back in the big fonts and the wider columns. But surely, the daily schedule-obsessives cry, if you're dedicated to journalism and pursuing the media, you don't have time to be doing all the world-travelling and Prime-Minister-bothering and research and advocacy and awareness, that the likes of Mary Allen and Freya Stark were getting up to?

Well, Mary Allen pursued the media to the extent that she could appear in ten British broadsheet newspapers in ONE DAY. She also wrote numerous books on her life and career as a self-appointed Women's Police Commandant, replied to every article about herself in the 'Letters' section of every newspaper (trust me, I've got them right here), had inappropriate crushes on fascist dictators (who gave her autographed and dedicated photographs of themselves left, right and centre, like members of a dodgy international underground boy-band), and she trained women police around the globe.

Freya Stark had twenty-five books published in her lifetime. And lived to be a hundred.

Imagine if you lived that long and only sat blogging about how little recognition women get instead of becoming passionate about something, maybe doing a little research, politely bothering a few individuals, and possibly going out and doing something about it...

A little PM-bothering of my own...

Maybe Mary Allen managed all of that because she wasn't raising children, you pipe up? No. Instead she recruited and helped to train tens of thousands of women in the UK and beyond, most of them educated, well-heeled, fashionable ladies, some who drove their own cars and flew their own planes. I wonder how many sickies she had to cover...

Junior attempts to throw a sicky. Think this is extreme? She's only home-schooled...

I'm led to believe that there are a couple of TV researchers out there at the minute who would love to get their hands on Mary Allen's hoarded stuff handed down through her family, which quite literally hasn't seen the light of day since the 1950s. I'd share more of it otherwise, but you get the general gist.

And there'd be no point posting it where any savvy researcher could nab it for free, while her descendants are still surviving on only the reduced salad dressings from Marks&Spencer on their Lidl's gravadlax and caviar, and I can't afford to give Junior pocket money to save up towards the impending parkour/zombie apocalypse.

Nothing makes a dangerous outdoor sport safer than doing it one-handed with a camera...

All I can say is, if you can get through half of what I've had to get through so far about Mary Allen and women's rights, glorified by early 20th Century women journalists in articles such as the ones above in REALLY BIG FONTS while the men get teeny tiny crappy ones, without turning the TV onto 'Dave' and mainlining Jeremy Clarkson and Sean Kelly to restore your sanity, you're a better pro-feminist than I am :)

Speaking of which, must be nearly time for Top Gear. And those fancy dress outfits don't sew themselves...

Happy Easter. Screw the media. Remember to get out more :) xxx

What does Voodoo do?

Zombie Girl Racer for the inaugural Hastings 1066 Walk of the Dead, November 2012

There's something very pleasing about a wardrobe full of fancy dress costumes. Costume party gear, not red carpet dress. Although that can be pleasing too, I imagine.

When I'm not being a ranting Voodoo, or writing - and I've recently rediscovered the joy of drawing - autumn is my favourite time of year, as it features Halloween. Even if I'm not involved in anything, it always feels a bit special. My best friend from school and I used to rent 'The Lost Boys' every Halloween. And it was Halloween when we got in one night and her mum told us that River Phoenix had died. That felt like the end of our childhood to me.

My first novel, written over 23 years ago now, revolved around Halloween, in a reality about five degrees askew from our own. So that's what I'm currently looking forward to.

But what else does Voodoo do, nobody is asking? Amid the multitude of internet rant-bots blogging away into the void, what does this one do, when not cultivating her own brand of attitude problem with the rest of the media world and its endearing, fear-mongering, attention-seeking foibles?

Well, I'm self-employed. I work for a number of clients who shall remain anonymous, all with high-profile professional careers. Some have been household names, and you'd certainly recognise their work. However, they're only just starting to grasp the idea of social media and having to do their own promotion, now that they're expected to. So that's what I do, for five minutes and two pennies to rub together. I set up the platforms and do the tutorials. Sometimes a bit of formatting and editing, and general I.T. support. A bit of film clip and showreel editing here and there, to enhance their profile content. It's an evolving business, so there's always more to add.

I've been asked interesting and thought-provoking things in my job. Such as 'How do I make all these other people on Google with the same name as me disappear?' and 'Why is this horror movie appearing in my Youtube (this list of Youtube search matches for my name) and can we report it to them?' and 'why aren't any of these people clicking on my Amazon widget?'

All I can say is, if you'd tried to make sense of any of this 30 years ago, people not clicking on your Amazon widget would be the least of your worries. But for people who didn't grow up with computers, and are only just discovering the blunders of technology, there are techno monkeys like me who just assume everyone can do it. Until I find myself consulted to troubleshoot everything from failed Paypal orders to failed ebook conversions.

Occasionally work gets more interesting, and I get to proofread and edit something different, like a feature screenplay about to go out on spec. Film is something else I've studied, and it's an entirely different kind of writing to books. So recently I was handed a screenplay that needed a bit of a rewrite and edit, based on a true story. It had been through group planning meetings several times in the past before being consigned to a cupboard for a while. I'd read it about three years ago when the writer was showing it to me as an example of earlier writing that she planned to rewrite as a book, but when this year some outlets for the screenplay emerged, it was dusted off for another round. So I read it more thoroughly.

Now, there are writers out there who obviously just sequester themselves away and write. They don't watch Family Guy or The Simpsons, they don't read Viz and they've never sat through a night of QI and Mock the Week, or The Big Bang Theory and CSI. They've never seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind or Star Wars, and definitely not The Hangover. Whether this is for artistic reasons, or religious reasons, or generational reasons, they voluntarily miss out on those things.

However, their potential audience won't have missed out so much. So when you're writing your blockbuster historical epic, and the last big movie you saw was Titanic, it's probably safest to get a more general consumer of popular culture to give it a quick once-over.

First of all, the Looming Great Mountain.

• You set your movie in the vicinity of a famous mountain. One or two scenes are placed in proximity to the mountain. This is enough reference to the mountain that a true story needs. Any further mention of the mountain 'looming' or characters who pause to stare at it in mid-scene every five pages or so, suggests that by the end of the movie, aliens are expected to fly out of it. All good if your movie features aliens, or is to be directed by George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. Avoid attaching misleading significance to the scenery, unless it is going to monumentally explode at some point.

Secondly, the female romantic lead whose lines of dialogue begin repeatedly with 'Oh *insert male romantic lead name here*'

• Try not to make your heroine unimaginatively irritating. Give her something original to say. But make sure, when you do give her a line, it's not something that Quagmire on Family Guy or Chef on South Park would say. Forbidden fruit, mmmm. Giggety giggety.

Thirdly, ethnic minorities who, once their familial relationships are established, continually address each other as 'My father', 'my brother', 'my son' etc...

• Also, try to avoid conversations between ethnic minorities in which they remind each other constantly about 'our ways' and 'our culture'. There is a little thing called 'show, don't tell'. It applies even more so to screenwriting than novel writing. Do not treat your ethnic minorities in the same way that Vulcans are treated in Star Trek. If the line 'Greetings, Earthling!' would fit in with the others you've written, you are in Star Trek dialogue territory. Equally, if they also speak to one another in flashback, out-of-vision, Obi-Wan Kenobi style. I scribbled Use the Force *insert name here*! at least once on my copy.

Fourthly, do not play fast and loose with various ethnicities' perceived grasp of English (copied from 'Allo 'Allo and Dad's Army).

• The screenplay very nearly had a full cup of tea spilled on it when I read the line 'Are you with us for long time Colonel?' spoken by a Japanese officer, followed by much repetition of 'Yes yes, very good, yes'. My annotation in black pen was Ooohh Me Love You Long Time Colonel! Yes Yes! :)

Fifth, over-use of 'Come' as an entire line of dialogue from the romantic male lead.

• Does he own a dog? In which case, 'come' may be acceptable once or twice, if the dog is also in a leading role (pun intended). However, if his romantic counterpart is female and human, over 17 years old, the audience is over 17 years old, and he is not a Bohemian vampire or a monosyllabic heroin addict, 'come' is the least romantic word I can think of, due to its over-use in the last thirty years or so of teenage vampire movies and soft porn. My annotation here, following a page of notes saying Enough 'yes yes!' and Enough looming great mountain! and Enough 'Ohhh *insert name here*' was Enough 'come'! 

Sixth point - make sure your characters stay in character. And your timeline stays characteristically true to time.

• For example, a police officer who calmly states what constitutes illegal activity in an opening scene should not suddenly become a superstitious mess in the middle without due cause, just to get a certain piece of info-dump across. And do not have small children impersonating aircraft at the turn of the 19th Century, unless their surname is Wright.

And seventh, the info dump.

• Make sure that if your characters in the early 20th Century feel the need to engage in lively historical exposition about events going on in the world at the time, it isn't verbatim information taken from Wikipedia. Unless they are still alive, and revered contributors to the Wiki community...

Anyway, it was all taken in good humour by the writer, and the edits were done and it's already being rejected by grumpy agents, from what I hear. They don't know what they're missing out on. I spent a whole six and a half hours on it! In my own bedtime! :)

I've heard funny things about higher profile first drafts recently (postmen driving mail vans and mobile phones in houseboats set in 1929), so I'm starting to wonder if the affliction of screenwriting is more common than we know.

Maybe that's why second anticipated movies are never as good as first hit movies. The writer/director has been told they're a brilliant writer, so they stop asking for second opinions or for proofreading from their friends and family. You never know...

...So that's what Voodoo does, when not hanging out on here, or slinging words around elsewhere in a cavalier fashion, making books out of them. Just in case you ever wondered what a rant-bot does in real life :)

L xxxxx

Voodoo New: The Zombie Adventures of Sarah Bellum

Out now on Amazon Kindle USA, UK, Canada, and Smashwords for all other devices and online reading. Available in paperback from Lulu.com - paperback coming soon to Amazon.

When keen Forensic Anthropology student Sarah Bellum has to attend an interview in her housemate's place, with the enigmatic vending machine entrepreneur Crispin Dry of Dry Goods, Inc, it sets off a chain of events that will alter her weekend plans for ever...

Sound familiar? Good - it's a parody. Of many stories - almost all of them famous. Just check out the chapter headings for an idea of what's in store!

Finding herself drawn hypnotically to this dark and complicated (and dead) man - Sarah, her housemate (name as yet unremembered) and their friends become embroiled in a family whose business is steeped in history. Or maybe just lost in it.

An action-packed adventure of love, loyalty, war, alcohol, zombies, rickshaws, and squid. Some things will be changed in your hearts afterwards for evermore - but hopefully not the bits that work.

Read on - if you dare...

I know, the moment I see him.

The black suit. The pallor of his skin. The attractively tousled, unkempt bed-hair. The drool. That limp… oh, God, that limp…!

"Crispin Dry?" My voice catches in my throat.

"Miss… Bellllummmm," he moans softly, extending a dirt-encrusted hand...

The Voodoo Christmas & New Year Revue: EA$Y MON£Y

Comedy short film, which I wrote and produced :)

Happy New Year!!!