I’m pretty jazzed about fans4writers.com. As a wannabe writer-but-mostly-blogger I felt compelled to learn more about the WGA strike currently going on. It’s not a good thing, this strike, and it will affect so many people. I feel bad that it came to this but I also feel a slight sense of solidarity for the writers. I’m not in their industry by any means, but I know what it’s like not to be fairly compensated for work I do.

So yeah, I’m supporting the strike as best I can for a chick in the boonies of Nebraska. Since my 24 site 24addict.com is rather popular (why I don’t know but hey, I’m not looking in that gift horse’s mouth) I’m taking advantage of the traffic my site generates to spread the word about fans4writers.com, trying to rally my 24 peeps around the picket sign, you know?

I absolutely love the fact that entire fan communities are, in essence, rising up and throwing their support behind the writers of their favourite shows. Instead of bemoaning the fact that a lot of these shows will end, will be delayed or will be in rerun hell, they’re sending pizza to picketing writers or joining them on the lines. It’s so awesome. I wish I lived in L.A. right now.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been so jazzed about a cause. It’s kinda nice 🙂

I’m falling down on the bloggin’ thang. I was doing so well too.

Actually I sort of created more “work” for myself this afternoon when I decided to leap blindly into writing an ‘Inside the Newsroom‘ type blog for the paper. I’ve been kicking the idea around for ages and after building a blog for the Editor’s editorial cartoons that he draws, I wasn’t going to wait around for someone to give me the go ahead.

It’s bare bones right now because hey, I just started it this afternoon. But I plan to post in there daily. Here’s hoping I manage to do it. Might be hard to talk about the goings-on inside the newspaper 5 days a week 🙂

I’ve also been sort of following the WGA strike that began this week. From an outsider perspective, it’s an interesting story to follow. I come down on the side of the writers myself. I’m not going to be fussed if the shows I’m following shut down production – and by fussed I mean I’m not going to whinge about it (I mean, 24 is shutting down later this month and the season premiere has been postponed. But I will not whinge.) I do worry for everyone who will be out of work while their shows are shut down. Not everyone in Hollywood makes buckets of cash and Christmas is a sucky time of the year to be out of work.

I only hope that the differences can be resolved satisfactorily and quickly, so the good folks who put these shows together can get back to doing what they do best.

In other news, my friends Mike and Sarah had their second child over the weekend. She’s quite beautiful and I’m very happy for them 🙂 I got to see her today during the obligatory New Baby Tour (Thanks Mike!) and she’s the cutest little thing.

Well I think that’s me caught up for a while. More babble later!

I know you’re probably sick to death of me going on and on about how much I dig Wil Wheaton (and I don’t mean that in a stalkery fangirl kind of way either. I reserve that behaviour for James Marsters, Kiefer Sutherland and David Boreanaz 🙂 )

No I just count myself lucky that I found his blog oh so long ago because he’s never steered me wrong when it comes to finding the coolest stuff on the Net. As a writer who’s had some success with his nonfiction books and as a blogger – two things near and dear to my heart – I really enjoy following his journey from getting an idea to getting it ‘out there.’

Anyway, enough being gushy, I really wanted to to post about the site I found through his blog called Ficlets. I read about it yesterday and as of five minutes ago I’ve published five ficlets and am so eager to write some more.

The purpose of Ficlets is to write a story in 1,024 characters or less. That works out to about 4-5 short paragraphs or so. The beauty of the idea is then other authors on the site can write a prequel or sequel to your ficlet and pretty soon a whole story is born. It’s really fun to see the twists and turns a story idea of yours can take when other people take control. I know the idea of round robins in storytelling is nothing new, but it’s still fun.

For instance, a ficlet I posted is actually the beginning to a finished story I wrote while ago. So I know where my story goes, and how it ends etc. The main character is a male. When I posted just the beginning of it, a commenter assumed the lead char was a female. Another writer just posted a sequel to one of my ficlets (my first sequel!) and went in a completely different direction than my actual story did. It’s just so interesting, you know?

Anyway, I’m totally hooked and would not be surprised if I stay up far too late tonight reading and writing ficlets because this site is getting me so jazzed about writing. I haven’t felt like this about it in forever. It’s teh awesome.

Thanks Wil.

(oh and off-topic, but my Vampcakes were a big hit at the office. Woot!)

Or “Vampcakes” as I like to call them 🙂

I saw this recipe for these suckers (Ha!) on BoingBoing the other day and thought they were awesome. So I got it in my head to make ’em.

However, the recipe above looked like far too much effort for some raised on Betty Crocker mixes, so I altered it just a tad – by using a cake mix and a canister of Whipped frosting. It worked a treat so if these appeal to you and you’re a lazy baker like me, feel free to ad lib like I did.

The cake mix I chose was French Vanilla (mmmmm) and the frosting is also vanilla. I had a lot of fun making these and cracking cheesy vampire jokes (What does a vampire fear most? Tooth decay!) When I put the cherry pie filling (which ends up being both the ‘blood’ inside the cupcake and the bite decoration) in the food processor, I managed to squick myself a little. It looked quite gory 🙂

Anyway here’s a pic of the first batch:

And here’s the inside after Shannon took a bite:

Neat eh? I’m taking ost of them to work tomorrow. Even made a Vampcakes sign complete with various vampires (Spike and Angel are in there of course! Along with Bela, Nosferatu, Lestat and Udo Kier from Andy Warhol’s Dracula)

Dorky? Me? Nahhh 😉

The title’s the song playing on Fred right now. It’s so bloody repetitive that it’s now stuck in my head. Yes I know it was a left-wing social commentary song banned by the BBC at the start of the Thatcher era but my god, it’s like 10 minutes of the same line over and over and over and gah! Enough!

I’m starting to get a little tired of listening to Fred. Same groups of songs from the same group of artists all the time. Hello, Fred? There are other bands out there besides Midnight Oil ok? And please please please stop playing The Cult. And get rid of that monotonously dull guy Bill Kates. He sucks.

Ok I think I’m done bitching now.

So the Director of Digital Publishing at Gatehouse stumbled on my previous post about the sale of my newspaper. He was kind enough to drop me an email and say hello and let me know that his company (soon to be my company, yay!) is looking forward to working with all of the papers they acquired from Morris. I thought that was pretty damn cool.

Well first I was all kinds of puzzled as to how he found me until I realized he followed a link from my coworker’s blog where she actually named names. I vagued up my own post because I’m overly paranoid about talking about work stuff in a blog. Lessons learned from Dooce, you know? 🙂

But since the news is public, why be paranoid? 🙂 Full story of the sale here.

After I got past the ‘how did he find me’ puzzlement, I toured around his blog for a while. I cannot wait to start working for this company. It’s going to rock. Some people from GateHouse are stopping by the paper on Monday (so of course we spent Friday afternoon tidying up, putting out the “good” plates, getting coffee ready etc.) for a meet and greet. Can’t wait.

So my newspaper got a bit blindsided by the news that we’ve been sold to another company along with 14 other dailies my current company owns. We were told last night about 20 minutes for 5pm and even the publisher was a bit shell shocked.

Of course there were a lot of shocked faces during the announcement, mostly because I think the first thing people wonder is if they will still have a job. When you have a family to support, you have to be at least a little wary. But we’ve been told no one’s losing their jobs and that our new parent company will work to make the transition as painless as possible.

The next thing you start thinking about is how something like this affects aspects of your job. For instance, in my department, which is the Online department, nearly every tool we use to publish the paper to the web, to schedule and post banner ads is proprietary software owned by our current company. If this sale closes by November 30th, does that mean everything will be taken away and we have to learn/design all new stuff to get the paper online in a month? Impossible. What about our archives? They go back to 1997. How will we transfer all that to new servers? Oh god the DNS transferring will be a friggin’ nightmare…

All these thoughts zip through your brain in a space of seconds until you feel a bit overwhelmed. THEN you start wondering what this new company is like. What about your benefits, your 401k, your insurance… It’s not long before you start to panic a little and when you come in to work the next day, everyone’s office-hopping trying to get a read on everybody’s reactions or trying to glean more info.

It’s been an interesting thing to observe, to be honest. For my part, I’m concerned about transitioning all our stuff because it will be me drowning in the DNS nightmare (I hate dealing with DNS crap with the white hot intensity of a thousand suns) – I say I’m concerned but I’m also kind of excited. I think this will be good for us.

My paper is pretty forward-thinking and we’ve been one of the top papers at my current company to lead the way in using the web to enrich the readers’ experience. I was told my paper was a deal breaker in this sale. They wanted us, the current folks didn’t want to give us up. In the end, their debt spoke louder than their desire to hang onto us. Fine by me.

The new company looks pretty good from everything I’m reading and I think I’ll enjoy observing this new experience. I’ve never been through a major shift like this. Should be cool.

Heh. Some dude just emailed me and offered to buy my 24addict.com domain name for 60 bucks. I scoffed. Sixty measly dollars for a domain I’ve owned for over 5 years and tended to like it was my own child? What a dolt.

It’s up for renewal in a few weeks but this is the first time an offer was made for it. He said, “I assume you are not interested in keeping it for yourself…” Ummm, did you bother to load up the addy in your little browser there buddy? Does it not look like a busy little site full of 24 goodness for the fans? Moron.

Ok, I’m done scoffing at this guy now 🙂

It’s been a nice weekend apart from dealing with domain vultures. Friday evening was spent with my Grampa at the season’s final football game at my daughter’s high school. What’s that? Me at a football game? The hell you say.

Yes it’s true! 🙂 The stadium was being rededicated in its 60th year and as it’s a memorial stadium originally dedicated to war vets, they invited WWII veterans to the game, fed them up, gave them some cool swag and honored them by name at halftime. My Grampa was one of them. It was really lovely and I think he felt pretty proud.

He served in the Navy on the USS Daly during WWII and the Korean War. Ironic eh? A boy from a landlocked state joining the Navy? 🙂 His Army father was none too pleased. I love listening to Grampa’s stories. My favourite one is the pineapple story. While he was away, the ship had evidently way overstocked on tinned pineapple, so it was served with every single meal day in and day out. Well, Grampa didn’t like it much to begin with but by the time he was allowed to go home on leave he pretty much never wanted to see another pineapple every again.

So he arrives home to Omaha and at his first dinner back, his family proudly served some pineapple that they had been saving from their rations just for him. The look on his face when he gets to this part of the story is hilarious. He said it was the hardest meal he ever had to eat because there was no way he was going to let them know how much he hated it.

Awww 🙂

Anyway, the game was fun even though we lost and Grampa went home a happy camper. The rest of the weekend we stayed in (as usual really) because the kid is not feeling so hot and I don’t want her to miss class. My first TV column in a while was in the paper Sunday which was nice. I did end up writing about the Vampire debate on Moonlight/Angel/Forever Knight and I nicked a lot of it from my last blog on the subject. I doubt anyone will comment on it though because that column is buried in the paper in the TV section no one ever reads because they all have on screen tv guides. Oh well, I have a nice scrapbook and can sort of say “I’m published” 🙂

I’m off to see if the vulture wrote me back when I none-too-politely told him to sod off.