cleolinda | Monday night, sleepy

All I wanted to say about last night's entry--besides "thank you" for all the comments and well-wishes--is that I felt better after writing it. I usually do, and I think it helps me to articulate "I'm going to do this" and put it on paper (uh... e-paper?) and see it out there. It may not have sounded terribly optimistic, but it's cathartic writing about it, and I've found over the years that I'm far from the only person who goes through this kind of thing. People tell me it helps them to read about someone else going through this crap, and then I feel better because I'm not the only one going through this crap, and together, we all feel a little more normal. So that's why I do it from time to time.

And apparently I felt so much better that I ripped through 3200 words in about three hours today, wtf. (Chapter 7, woot woot!) Maybe it was the ~~cathartic relief~~ Mountain Dew? I will have another tomorrow. Although I did realize that the material as written gives away something I didn't want to give away until the next chapter, and there's pretty much no way around that, because it's now part of a chain reaction that causes that next chapter to happen. So. Uh. I'm just going to keep writing and leave it to my first readers--my mother, my agent, my best friends, whoever--to tell me if it works or not. I've also decided that from now until December 14 is simply for writing--filling in holes, making sure it's a complete, coherent narrative, all that, and if I have to say that Lady Something walked down Whatever Street, so help me, I'll do it, and I'll leave last-minute spot research (usually regarding exact geography) for the second half of the month. That seems fair, and it seems like a good way from preventing myself from getting bogged down in details. Also, a good bit of what I've asked for for Christmas and my birthday is books for research--some of them for this book, some of them for the second one (set in Paris). Also: if anyone knows of a good book about the 1889 Exposition Universelle--the Paris World's Fair--that's 1) on par with The Devil in the White City and 2) IN ENGLISH, I will love you forever.

Linkspam:

NBC, dicksmacks par excellence: NBC fires entire SNL staff; 'SNL' show live from N.Y. but not on TV; NBC sending out force majeure letters to actors ("But it appears the actors and their reps are planning to fight this idea of putting actors on indeterminate hold without pay under a 'too bad we own you' power play").

TV writers, studios to talk.

Evil Lincoln: "And a heads up: take everything you read from Variety with a brick of salt. They're the AMPTP's propaganda machine of choice."

Wannabe writers out of work, too; How much DO the writers make exactly?

callie: "Because there's no problem that can't be solved by sending people a bunch of crap, pencils to media moguls in support of the strike." Joss Whedon explains. I was concerned about the mailroom workers, but it looks like they'll be delivered directly to the CEOs in bulk by truck.

Point the fans to http://unitedhollywood.blogspot.com/, where there will be a banner or button allowing them to click through to buy boxes of pencils. The pencils are plain wooden #2’s, and the company uses sustainable farming for the wood (seriously. They do.) The pricing will be “a buck a box.” (Sustainably harvested wood pencils + PayPal cost per transaction puts us a little higher than the cost of a box if you buy at Office Depot, sorry.) If there’s any money left over, it will be donated to the Union Solidarity Fund, which is a nonprofit for non-WGA members affected by the strike.
When fans click to buy the pencils, they can choose to identify the show they are supporting if they want. (This will generate a database of fans by show – among other things, allowing showrunners to thank fans by group if they want to.)
The pencils will be delivered in bulk, by trucks, like the peanuts were. The deliveries will be to the 6 CEOs of the 6 congloms (Disney, News Corp, Viacom, Time Warner, CBS, GE) one by one – we’ll probably start with GE. If we get enough to pencils to do all 6, then we will. If we don’t, we’ll concentrate on one or two.