Today “celebrates the weavers of words.”
In honor of Wordsmith Day, the striking writers in Hollywood have written some wordy picket signs.
I’ve been keeping up with those writers in an empathetic way, comparing their situations with my work in a different part of the writing world.
One complaint is similar: In both cases writers are expected to do their research and experimentation on their own time. A project that requires months of prep and study and experiments is paid the same as an instantly familiar ‘mechanical’ project. Other jobs pay for research time. A chemist at Dow is always paid for every day of research and study, whether it’s easy or hard, and whether the project sells or not.
Another complaint is definitely different. Hollywood tries to avoid paying royalties for reruns and streaming. Textbook publishers are STRICT about paying royalties for every sale of the book.
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Seems like a weak time for a strike. Corporate demons are pushing hard to replace all humans with AI, and a strike is the ideal opportunity to make the shift. Also, according to the insiders, the studios have a huge backlog of pre-recorded shows right now, so they can do without writers for a couple years.
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TMI: Today is NOT one of my wordsmith days. Sleep is the variable. When I get enough sleep I can find the right words and assemble them in terse form. When I don’t get enough sleep, my writing is repetitive and overlong, like Google Translate. Last night a thunderstorm kept me awake, so this little piece took 10 revisions to sort of halfway clean up.
Polistra's Mill 