Live Television

I’ve seen a lot of memes, jokes and videos lately about smartphones hogging attention, causing accidents and absurdly, preventing people from talking to each other. While I agree that they are one of the most double-edged technological inventions so far and often wish I’d never got one and become a dependent, I’m finding myself far more disturbed by the change that the digital age has made to one of our much older electronic distractions.

There was a time when TV was an extravagant luxury. A person would be fortunate indeed if they knew someone that had one, even if it could only display a crackly, fuzzy, intermittent black and white picture. When they eventually became available to a wider audience, they were used to transmit huge events – moon landings, world championships, royal weddings, whatever might be deemed important or newsworthy in the society of the time. Documentaries eventually gave way to entertainment shows for families to spend their quality time on. The soap operas that initially only aired for half an hour each week built up to several instalments competing for airspace every weeknight, followed by impossibly long omnibus editions to see addicts through the weekend. The variety of programmes, foreign imports, number of channels and broadcasting times continued to increase until TV stealthily became an inescapable and integral part of life.

Now, with the advent of wi-fi laptops, tablets, aforementioned smartphones, digiboxes, media players, streaming and a wealth of speedy downloadable content from across the globe, I genuinely fear that the western world is blindly and obediently entering some Orwellian state of totalitarianism.

When I was growing up (which wasn’t that long ago), anyone sad enough to collect VHS copies of favourite shows to watch consecutively and repeatedly were labelled as geeky, socially deficient saddos, and encouraged to get out more and find a real hobby. Any twenty-something who told their friends they’d spent Saturday night sitting in watching telly would be pitied and/or ridiculed. How times change. In the ‘enlightened’ 21^st century, a couple sitting down to 6 consecutive episodes of the same series on their night off would probably be considered a date.

TV has undergone a magical transformation from something people did when they had nothing better to do, to something people choose to do above all other things. It’s deemed freakish to NOT have one in the house. I know a few people who don’t own a TV, and from the reactions they get from others when they tell people this, they might as well be saying they have serious psychiatric disorders and enjoy depriving their children of vital stimulus and education. Oh, the irony.

I’m not an innocent in all this, I do watch TV myself and I do have favourite programmes which I have been known to get very enthusiastic about, but I try to incorporate this into my life in a healthy way by following them one at a time on a weekly basis, and not allowing any of them to take over my life. During many lengthy periods I’ve lived without a TV, I’ve remained happy, felt liberated in many ways and definitely been more productive. Even with a TV in my bedroom, I still find time to write, read, exercise, go outside a lot and interact with real people.

 I find it off-putting that the occasional well-written, acted and produced shows capable of providing great insight, or provoking genuine emotion and thought are milked dry by greedy distribution networks, endlessly imitated and far outweighed by the mindless drivel and cheap cannon fodder. I won’t have the TV on even ‘in the background’ if that’s all its hundreds of channels can offer me. I’ll just find something else to do. There’s a real world out there.

What saddens me the most is the willing acceptance of this as our new culture. It’s actually become a preferred lifestyle choice. People don’t find common ground any more, they find mutually agreeable viewing material. Small talk and social media posts centre around it. I rarely see some of my friends more animated than when they’re extolling the virtues of Netflix or whatever US series they happen to be in a serious long-term relationship with at the time. I despair at the use of Cbeebies as a primary source in child development and behaviour management, and of grown adults sacrificing so much of their own precious lives in exchange for the contrived experiences of fictional characters.

One of my closest friends recently expressed a strong desire to procure himself a media pod – which seemed to me to be some horrific, Matrix-esque virtual reality device in which a human being can voluntarily incarcerate themselves to stare at screens for hours on end and endure a slow, electronic lobotomy. Another showed me a diary she’s started keeping of the numerous shows she is currently following simultaneously, as it’s becoming too difficult for her evolved, intelligent brain to keep track. I confess that I myself have succumbed to the temptation of downloading a show from another country so I can watch it a whole 24 hours before it’s due to air in my own. It’s looking increasingly like manufacturers will continue developing the sound and image quality of their overpriced equipment until their complexity exceeds anything that basic human senses can hope to process. I don’t want to consider where it will all end.

Maybe soon it will be normal for everyone to live in individual pods with only a carefully catalogued digital menu of noisy, colourful, crystal clear distractions for company; oblivious to the fact that it’s keeping them quiet, quelling their energy and lulling them to sleep on a much grander scale than the Disney channel does to unruly toddlers. Maybe by then it will be too late to wake up and reclaim life.

Call me over dramatic, but if Orwell’s nightmare prophecy taught us anything, it’s that if there is hope for the future, it lies in the masses. Only we can change it, but we probably won’t.

Because the Walking Dead starts again soon, and there’s a Breaking Bad spin-off on the way.

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Faith in G.O.D.

All my life, it’s been a dream of mine to become a traditionally published author. I even had two favourite publishing houses and a literary agent picked out as my preferred choices of representation. I knew it would take a lot of hard work, which I gladly and diligently supplied, and some talent, which I believed and had been told I possessed. But I had absolutely no control over the amount of luck it would take, and a pretty poor production record in previous attempts to make my own.

We’ve all heard the stories of even the best and most famous writers suffering continual humiliation and ignorance before their eventual breakthrough. The chances of the right person picking up your manuscript from a slush pile of thousands are slim, and the odds of them being bowled over by it within the permitted three chapter submission even slimmer, especially when you’ve written a book as odd as mine. It’s complicated, it doesn’t fit into any current literary trends, and it’s not for everyone. After a year or so of entering competitions and submitting to agents, I got sick of all the months of waiting around, relying on other people, only to receive another unexplained rejection at the end of it. Especially as it didn’t necessarily mean my book was bad – it just meant they didn’t think it would sell, because sadly money is the be all and end all of artistic endeavour in the cynical modern world.

I never cared about the profit, I just wanted an audience. I wouldn’t have spent years writing this book voluntarily if I was concerned with being well paid for my labours – I wrote it because I felt I had something to say. I’d be unlikely to make much money from traditional publishing anyway - I read an article only last week stating that the average full-time writer earns just £11,000pa, so I wouldn’t be giving up the day job even with a book deal. People getting what I was trying to achieve and appreciating how I’ve gone about it is, to me, a far greater measure of success than amassing wealth or fame. I eventually decided I needed to do what I always end up doing in every area of life (see previous blogs), and go independent.

I’ll confess to being snobby about self publishing in the past. It seemed to me to be nothing more than modernised vanity publishing. Anyone could do it, it didn’t require any recognition or skill, and I didn’t want to see the beloved novel of which I was so proud languishing in undiscovered ebook oblivion among the millions of other wannabes. I would only consider it as a last resort, when all else had failed.

Then I recalled the many tales I’ve heard from traditionally published first-time authors I’ve met over the years of their efforts to promote their debut novels and persuade stores to stock them, with little assistance or budget from their publishers. It often resulted in them remaining largely unknown despite their enviable achievement. It occurred to me that in the end, both routes require the same gamble, as putting the book out there is only half the battle – making it known to potential readers is by far the greater struggle. At least with self publishing, worldwide availability is guaranteed.

Further research proved to me that the book industry is changing. Publishers aren’t spending so much time and money on new authors or producing paperbacks, and more and more novelists are discovered after publishing and promoting themselves. Some are even opting to remain independent, and some that have previously had book deals are going independent by choice. I realised that self publishing would not mean I’d given up on my book, but that I still believed in it despite all the rejections. I also still hope it might be seen by the right people by putting it out into the world, but even if it isn’t scouted by anyone in the industry, I’ll honestly be happy if a few strangers enjoy reading it and leave a nice review, or if it makes just one person think differently.

I was also wrong about it being easy. During the dark days of final preparations, ruthless revisions and tedious formatting that have been the last few weeks of my life, I’d have given anything to have a team of editors, proofreaders, designers and marketing experts behind me. But in the end, doing it all myself only gave me more to be proud of, and allowed me to retain all rights and complete creative control of my work, which are also major positives of indie authorship.

The biggest test of all applied to either publishing method, and that was having the guts to place it at the mercy of the public at all. It’s hard to let go of something that’s been a part of my life for so long. It’s my creation and it contains a lot of me, so in many ways it feels like sending my child (or rather my outcast Frankenstein-esque creature) out to make its own way in the world. I want to set it free and allow it to do the best it can, but I’m also terrified of letting other people anywhere near it and will be most upset if anything bad happens to it. So please take care of it for me. 

It’s strange and complicated, and not to everyone’s taste, but stick with it, and you might just find something interesting hidden beneath the surface. I did say it was like me.

Buy G.O.D. in paperback here: http://www.feedaread.com/books/GOD-9781784079451.aspx

Or buy on kindle here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00MBXVWII?*Version*=1&*entries*=0

 (links for all other countries at http://www.shelleyirving.com)

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