gwynnega

I actually heard about this today from a friend in Pennsylvania, so in case any of you in California haven't heard about it:

The California Senate is just 2 votes short to pass its single payer health care bill, SB 810 - the California Universal Healthcare Act, before the end of this legislative session on Tuesday.

Four Democratic Senators have not voted either way on this bill. Its author, Senator Mark Leno, can bring the bill up for reconsideration, as long as he knows that he has two more votes!!

Most of us have family or friends in California. Many of these Californians may not know how important it is to call and email these 4 Senators over the weekend, and first thing Monday. We can help. Alert your California contacts that they must take action right away. They don't need need to live in the districts - these Senators hold the key to all of California's health care.

The Senators need to hear loud and clear how important it is for Californians to get SB 810 passed. Call each Senator listed below and ask them to vote yes on SB 810.

The Senators who must be contacted are:

Senator Alex Padilla (District 20 - Pacoima/LA area) can be contacted
by email at Senator.Padilla@sen.ca.gov
In Sacramento at 916-651-4020
Or in Van Nuys at 818-901-5588

Senator Michael Rubio (District 16 - Fresno/Bakersfield area) can be contacted
by email at Michael.Rubio@sen.ca.gov
In Sacramento at 916-651-4016
Or in Bakersfield at 661-395-2620

Senator Juan Vargas (District 40 - San Diego) can be contacted by
email at Juan.Vargas@sen.ca.gov
In Sacramento at 916-651-4040
Or in Chula Vista at 619-409-7690

Senator Rod Wright (District 25 - LA area) can be contacted
by email at Senator.Wright@sen.ca.gov
In Sacramento at 916-651-4025
Or in Inglewood at 310-412-0393

Single payer in California is a huge step forward for healthcare. These four State Senators hold the key to our Healthcare. Have everyone you know in California call and email them.

I've been trying to think of a name for a fictional mid-1970s women's bookstore (for the Jo book). Any suggestions?

The women's bookstore I worked at (in the mid-1980s, when I was an undergrad at UCLA) was called Bread & Roses. In many ways it was my favorite job I ever had, though I practically paid them to work there, what with all the books I bought. I really wish it (and Sisterhood Bookstore, my other local feminist bookstore) still existed.

I've finished the new chapter 17 of the Jo book, and am working on chapter 18.

Word count: 51,657

Page count: 180

It's coming right along (though never as quickly as I would like!).

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The OLTL finale was brilliant, especially the part where ( spoiler )

. I think I'm currently in denial--I half-expect to have a new episode of OLTL to tune into on Monday. Instead I have until sometime in February to wait for Carlivati & Valentini's General Hospital to kick in (with OLTL characters showing up).

Here's a great article about former OLTL writer Michael Malone. It concludes: "as to whether One Life to Live will indeed live again, he remains optimistic: 'You never know, people might get tired of watching people diet.'"


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I've been dealing with some stubborn hip/leg pain that is making this holiday weekend a bit less relaxing than it otherwise might be. Ugh.

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I hear this week's Supernatural was a good one? I guess I'd better watch...

...but that probably won't be today.

Monday was the first day on the job for General Hospital's new head writer Ron Carlivati and executive producer Frank Valentini (who both made the jump from One Life To Live). Yesterday it was announced that Tristan Rogers will be reprising his role of Robert Scorpio on GH (joining Finola Hughes as Anna Devane). Robert and Anna are two of my all-time favorite GH characters (and there are rumblings that other favorites will return).

Then today it was announced that four OLTL characters--Todd, Blair, Starr, and John McBain--are crossing over to GH!

If this were happening under the previous craptastic writing regime (still currently airing), my reaction would've been: Ugh, don't get any icky GH on these fine OLTL characters! But I have confidence in Ron Carlivati's ability to turn GH around.

Of course, ABC will probably still cancel GH later this year, even if its ratings go up. But at least Carlivati and Valentini are doing everything they can to give it a fighting chance. And if it does go off the air, at least its final months will be enjoyable (which is more than I can say for the past many months!).

Here's a great Michael Logan interview with Erika Slezak: Erika Slezak Goes to Heaven One Last Time on One Life to Live

And how is it possible there's only week left of One Life To Live? Gah. This week's episodes have been so much fun, with an epic prison break releasing a whole bunch of OLTL's criminals to wreak mayhem. Among said criminals: Roscoe Born as creepy preacher (and purveyor of the iced tea of evil) Mitch Laurence! And today it was revealed that ( spoiler! )

As Sara Bibel said in her Deep Soap column today: "This is the first time in soap history that a show is ending on such a creative highpoint. The final weeks of AMC were great, but they were all about fixing the damage that had been done to the show. OLTL has been, on the whole, good for the past few years and great in 2011. When I watched the New Year’s Day marathon on SOAPnet, I was struck that the current OLTL is as good as the episodes of the 1990s. I can’t say that about any other soap. If I did not know that the show was going to be ending in a week, it would seem like it was launching a lot of major storylines. Granted, at the time the finale was filmed, everyone involved believed the show would continue, but this feels so different than all of the times I have watched the lowest rated soaps on the air essentially raise the white flag, give everyone a thrown together happy ending, and fade to black. The circumstances surrounding the cancellation of OLTL are unprecedented and it’s a shame that nobody outside of the soap fandom is paying any attention."

To which I can only add: Damn, I will miss this show. And if ABC thinks I am ever going to watch The Revolution (despite Tim Gunn's presence), they are sadly mistaken.

My vacation has, as usual, flown by. I didn't do everything I'd wanted to, but I got to see friends and my mom, went to a couple of movies, worked on the Jo book, and caught up on my sleep to a ridiculous extent. Tonight I will have my customary new year's eve with champagne, caviar and other goodies.

2011 was mostly a good year for me, though it started badly with the death of the Garage Kitty. I had hoped to finish the Jo book this year, but the reason it's not quite done is that a few months ago I figured out a missing component to make it awesome. I managed to finish a short story, which is out on submission. Wrote a few poems, and sold two to Strange Horizons, which makes me very happy. Went to WisCon, Readercon, and World Fantasy, which were all a lot of fun.

In the coming year I expect to finish the Jo book, get started on other fiction projects, write more poems. I plan to go to WisCon and Readercon, and possibly Worldcon.

I'd like to read more in 2012. I'd also like to have more of a social life (in spite of the dayjob)...though I suspect I say that every year!

A very happy new year, everyone!

There's so much that I want to do on my holiday break, I've barely known where to start. (Though I have, of course, been working on the Jo book, watching soaps, etc.) Yesterday I had lunch with tesserae_ at Say Cheese (which was quite good, though I'm still missing the Coffee Table), and she gave me some awesome mince cookies.

Today I went to see the new Sherlock Holmes film, which I enjoyed a lot--even more than the first one, I think. I had a quibble or two with this one, but it felt like they remembered to include an actual story this time. (Though with the first film, I was happy enough to watch Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law sans story.) Since I saw the movie at the Los Feliz Theater, I stopped in at Skylight Books and said hi to Cecil Castellucci, who was wrapping gifts. I hadn't planned to buy anything, but the place was freshly stocked with new books about the 1970s, and I could not resist! So I purchased When We Were Outlaws by Jeanne Cordova (a memoir of an activist "fighting at the intersections of the struggle for Gay Rights, Women's Liberation, and the New Left") and Those Girls: Single Women in Sixties and Seventies Popular Culture.

A little while ago I watched Miracle on 34th Street on TCM and finished wrapping presents. I think later I will watch The Bishop's Wife. Tomorrow I'll go to my mom's for dinner.

Happy holidays, everyone!

I have had pretty much the platonic ideal of a quiet, relaxing weekend, which is something I really needed. I worked on the Jo book, read, watched Kate Hepburn movies on TCM (Holiday and Little Women, two that I hadn't seen in years), did a little Christmas shopping, watched a little Dark Shadows, ate mini candy-cane cookies. Oh, and I watched the ( season finale of Dexter. )

I've just finished the new version of chapter 16 of the Jo book. I'm at 48K words, 168 pages. Feeling pretty good about the book at the moment, and happy that I'll have some extra time over the holidays to work on it.

Three more days at the office, and then I'm off until the new year.

In which Prospect Park continues to degenerate from heroes of the soap genre to mustache-twirling villains: yesterday Variety reported that Prospect Park is still shopping One Life To Live and All My Children. The kicker: "one of the options Prospect Park is said to be considering is bringing in an overseas firm to turn the shows into a co-production. That may or may not allow the shows to circumvent the unions, which couldn't come to terms with Prospect Park on compensation for talent on both sides of the camera."

I.e., Prospect Park may be hoping to do some union busting. This would be 1) disgusting and 2) stupid, because none of the actors, writers, crew, etc. for these shows would opt for a non-union deal. For a great, scathing take on these developments, here's a post by Lana Nieves: Occupy Your Conscience.

Meanwhile, as OLTL hurtles towards its final episode (which airs on January 13th), it is engaging in some awesome meta. On Tuesday there was a brilliant and hilarious episode in which the whole town watches Fraternity Row, the soap within the soap which originally appeared on OLTL in the eighties. Various OLTL characters reel at the show's plot twists. Then, at the end of the episode, Roxy (Ilene Kristen) reels to discover the soap has been canceled! On yesterday's show, Roxy begs Clint Buchanan to resurrect the show, but he mouths ABC's party line that the show's time has come (even though he was watching the show with the rest of the town the day before, delivering my favorite line of the episode: "These damn writers are messing with my Brianna!"). Roxy tells him not to be so condescending and storms off to save her beloved show.

As of about an hour and a half ago, my neighborhood finally has power after nearly a day and a half without it. Wednesday night I had a hair-raising drive home from work through high Santa Ana winds. I had to dodge palm fronds, capsized trash cans, a fallen tree in the road, etc. But that was just the beginning. When I got home, the power briefly went out a couple of times. Then, around 1 a.m., it went out and didn't come back on. Hundreds of thousands of people lost power, and LA County (among other local areas) declared a state of emergency.

I stayed home from work yesterday, because the howling wind had kept me awake much of the night. This turned out to be a good move, because traffic was snarled by all the debris from the winds, and lots of traffic lights were still out. (There was also supposed to be more dangerous weather ahead, but that didn't seem to materialize--it was windy, but not horribly so.) Hanging out in my electricity-less apartment got old fast. Fortunately Gelson's had power, so I had coffee. Plus Hard Times Pizza somehow had power, so I had pizza for dinner. But then I huddled in my cold apartment and read A Monstrous Regiment of Women by flashlight.

When I woke up this morning and the power STILL wasn't back on, I was pretty aggravated. But when I went out to get coffee at Gelson's, I saw workmen working on the power lines at my corner, and I took heart--plus the traffic light by the Trader Joe's was finally working again, and TJ's was open again. Sure enough, just as I was walking back home with my coffee, the traffic lights at my corner came back on, and everybody cheered!

Then I went home and had a hot shower. Hooray!