| Friday, November
2, 2007
As expected, the Writers Guild West has
called for a strike. Picket lines go up just after midnight Sunday.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/content_display/
news/e3iffd111966f0eedab6711aba177715e47?imw=Y
It doesn't affect me much. I don't do TV or movie scripts.
Niven and I have made some money -- probably the most per hour of work we
ever made -- working on movies and TV, but it's not our bag, and the last
time there was a serious attempt to get us into TV our agent took us on a
series of meetings with network executives. The meeting with Joss Wheedon's
people went well, and for a while there it looked as if we might create a
series for Wheedon (a modern times series set in The Magic Goes Away
universe, in which the magic is still around but weak: but there's a lot in
the gold in Fort Knox, for example, if only someone knows how to use it, and
a couple of teenagers learn to use manna if they can find it, but there are
leftover ancient wizards who are also interested, and --), but ultimately he
decided to put his energy into something else. The rest of the meetings were
with Network Executives about 27 years old, who had certainly never read any
science fiction or fantasy that had not been made into a movie or TV
episode, and apparently never any read a book since college if then. They
apparently read only reports by people junior to them. They were the most
arrogantly ignorant people I ever met.
After the third such meeting I told Niven, "If we do
everything just right, we will get to spend a lot of time with people like
that." Larry laughed, and we told our agent he was wasting his time. Not
ours: we're always willing to meet people who may end up as characters in a
book and at the time we were thinking about a sequel to Inferno.
We have friends who do all their work through the WGA, and
we wish them well. Their cause is a good one, and will eventually affect
book writers as well. No one knows how much revenue there is in digital
rights, but writers certainly deserve a larger residual share than 0.3%,
which is what they get now. Producers, of course, get many times that much.
There will be serious effects on what we in Los Angeles
call "the Industry".
=========
Niven and I are working on Inferno II. Today Roberta and I
went for our usual 2-mile walk in the neighborhood, then Niven came over and
Larry and I went up to the top of our hill (4 miles round trip and 800 foot
climb). Sable was overjoyed, and is now flat out by the pool. Larry and I
went to lunch.
I'm getting Orlando, my IBM t42p laptop, ready to go off
for another warranty trip: he got a new fan and works fine unless I try to
do something that requires really intense graphics, at which point the
screen goes blank. The computer continues to work, and if you can fly blind
you can shut it down (or use the hardware switch to do that). After a shut
down he comes back up just fine. The blank screen is accompanied with a lot
of heat. Anyway, Lenovo is going off to get that fixed. As in the past,
IBM/Lenovo has been exemplary in honoring the warranty (and the people
involved have no idea that I write a column). Just now Norton Backup and
Restore is making a full backup of Orlando before he goes off to Atlanta.
Full story in Chaos Manor Reviews.
===========
We are now working on both Inferno I and Inferno II. We
need to put together a cast of characters for each book. There are a few
more scenes to be added to Inferno II, and a few adjustments to Inferno I.
After which I should be caught up. Sort of. Practically
almost.
My thanks to all those who have recently
subscribed or renewed their subscriptions.
============
I guess I will give up on Firefox. Every time I need to
use it, the critical need detector kicks in: Firefox has a new revision and
I have to wait for that to install before I can open the browser. My memory
may be way off but it seems to happen very frequently, and inevitably when I
am trying to unscramble an error message.
=======
I will have a story in Chaos Manor Reviews. The bottom
line is, if you rely on Norton Backup and Restore, don't count on doing
anything in a hurry under either Vista or XP. The problem has to do with
Windows and USB external drives.
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