gwynnega

The draft of the Jo book (actual title: Can't Find My Way Home) is done-ish. Which is to say, it's done, but I still need to listen to the spoken text file this week to be sure.

Word count: 89,122

Page count: 320

Yaaaaaay!!!

Also, yesterday I went to Skylight Books for Small Business Saturday (bought The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson and a Moleskine notebook), and one of my favorite soap opera actors, Matthew Ashford, was there. He was engrossed in a book, so I refrained from going up to him and blathering about how Days of Our Lives shouldn't have killed off his character.

I guess I'll start with the bad/the ugly, which, as usual these days, is General Hospital. Recently I ranted about the show's execrable misuse of Robin Scorpio's HIV storyline. Unsurprisingly, Kimberly McCullough, who has played Robin on and off since the mid-1980s, is opting to leave the show. She has a burgeoning directing career, but Jason Thompson, who plays Robin's husband Patrick, revealed recently in an interview that he and McCullough were deeply unhappy about the recent storyline, and that McCullough nearly chose to walk rather than play it--so I'm assuming the crappy writing is a factor in her departure. With Jonathan Jackson leaving too, I have a palpable sense of what was left of GH's soul leaving the building. (Michele Val Jean, the member of GH's writing team who should have been made head writer instead of the floundering Garin Wolf, has also jumped ship, and is now writing for The Bold and the Beautiful.)

Also in the realm of the bad: last week One Life To Live finished taping its shows for ABC. OLTL, which is in excellent creative shape, goes off the air in January. Now there are rumors that Prospect Park, which is supposed to continue the show online, is having budget problems, and that there will be a delay in getting the new OLTL off the ground. I really hope it's only a delay.

The good: Days of Our Lives, which was craptastic until recently, has been improving by leaps and bounds, and now they've kicked the show into high gear by reigniting the love/hate pairing of Sami/EJ. I can only compare them (and their sex scenes yesterday) to season six Buffy/Spike. The scenes also gave a nice nod to show history, in that Sami's son Will (who is about to have a major coming-out story) walks in on his mother cheating with EJ, just as, almost twenty years ago, teenage Sami walked in on her mother cheating on her dad (resulting in years of Sami mayhem).

Also good: I know I have some As the World Turns fans on my FL, so for those of you who may not know about this: there is now an ATWT five-DVD boxed set and a Christmas in Oakdale single DVD for sale. I'm hoping this will be a trend, and that more classic soap stuff (besides Dark Shadows, which is already available in its entirety!) will be released on DVD.

Yesterday I went to the Bonaventure Hotel in downtown LA, I think for the first time since the late seventies. (I used to go there for Beatlefest back when John Lennon was alive.) I did a quick walk through the Romantic Times Book Fair, which was WAY too crowded. Then I had a great visit with my agent dianafox, in town for the RT Booklovers Convention. Then, when I was waiting for the valet to return my car, who should appear right in front of me but Bill Hayes and Susan Seaforth Hayes, i.e., Doug and Julie from Days of Our Lives (arguably the first soap supercouple of all time)!! I managed not to blurt out, "You're Doug and Julie!" I did think it a good omen for the Jo book. (The only soap actor sighting to beat this one was when Heather Webber and Rose Kelly [actors Robin Mattson and Loanne Bishop from General Hospital] sat in the row right in front of me during a two-act play of Plath's Letters Home, in 1983 or so. They only stayed for the first act.)

Speaking of the Jo book, this weekend I had a mini "What To Do When the Revolution Doesn't Pan Out" film festival: Sidney Lumet's beautiful Running on Empty (River Phoenix was still alive when I last saw it) and Tanya Hamilton's Night Catches Us (2010), set in 1976 Philadelphia, about former members of the Black Panther Party. I was particularly struck by how both movies show the children of former revolutionaries trying to come to grips with their parents' histories and how these histories have shaped and impinged upon their own lives.

Then tonight I watched episode one of the Upstairs, Downstairs reboot on PBS. It won me over, though now I want to play my DVDs of the classic series.