On Strike! Day 91!

Hi, it’s me again. I’m still on strike 91 days later. Not from these essays, obviously. I do these for the love of the game (at least until someone offers to pay me for them, then I’m selling out faster than a politician on a billionaire’s yacht). No, I’m still on strike from my day job of screenwriting and I wanted to fill you in on how it’s been going. So, if you’re a network executive or a scab feel free to skip this one and maybe next week I’ll be back to writing about how much I hate the tags on t-shirts or how much I enjoy a sticker that peels off nicely, or some dumb shit like that.

We’ve been on strike for three months, and while a lot of things have stayed the same, some big things have changed! The Director’s Guild took a deal and didn’t join the strike (sure, whatever. If you got the deal you wanted then good for you), the Screen Actors Guild didn’t and is striking! It’s been pretty insane to see the difference it makes going from 11,000 writers striking alone with the odd supporter here and there to 11,000 writers and 160,000 actors. The picket lines got a lot more crowded and a lot better looking.

Since the weather has turned hellish here in Los Angeles, I haven’t been picketing as much as I could be, but I’ve been going through a bit of an existential crisis. I’ve spent the last 8 years of my life doing everything in my power to make it in this industry. I’ve written god knows how many scripts, rewritten them all hundreds of times, and thrown away thousands of bad ideas (and probably a few good ones). With all that hard work, I’ve had some highs to look back on: I sold a pilot for a kid’s show to Nickelodeon and a movie to Hallmark. The only problem is I sold the TV show in January of 2020…which meant the once-in-a-lifetime (hopefully) pandemic put it on the shelf for good. The movie, on the other hand, sold right before the first WGA strike in 15 years…lucky me.

All of this bad timing has led me to quite a bit of soul-searching. Do I have what it takes to keep trying after these heart-breaking near misses? Is the universe trying to tell me that I majorly fucked up by not going to law school and instead trying to do a job that might be fun instead? Should I give up writing and try to figure out how to code or is it too late to get on that bandwagon too?!

It might be the ennui of a three-month strike and the looming threat of corporate attempts to turn writers into gig workers and AI babysitters but I’ve been feeling pretty dang aimless and I figured, who better to talk to about this than my wonderful subscribers?

So, if you have any advice for me, for the short term or the long term, I’m all ears (or eyes I guess)! K THX LUV U BYE