Despite a 59 percent vote in favor of new leadership for SAG that would rather negotiate with AMPTP instead of strike, SAG has not yet voted to table strike authorization. This is after a campaign that promised to keep actors working.

SAG, which has been woefully out of touch with economic realities and how it affects their negotiating position, took a step in the right direction by selecting leaders who want to get a contract done and end the production uncertainty in Hollywood, but until they actually deliver, they’re nothing but a lot of talk and a badge… and some diet pills won’t solve that.

After losing over eighty pages of a novel I was working on when my hard drive crashed, the temptation as I’ve worked to get started on the book again has been to attempt to reconstruct what I had already written.

The trouble with that approach is like the trouble with caring for flowering trees; it just doesn’t feel right. Flowers should be plants, not on trees; and similarly, my old chapters should be what they were, not the pale imitation they come out being if I try to recreate what I wrote the first time.

No, it’s definitely better to just re-imagine the whole thing, I think, and view it as an opportunity to do a better job the second time around.