I live in a place called Stuyvesant Town on the north edge of the lower east side of Manhattan. Stuy Town is pretty well known for its squirrels and parks and pigeons and things, but what even a lot of residents don't know is that we also have a mating pair of Red-tailed Hawks. This isn't unprecedented in New York, where two of 5th Avenue's most famous residents, Pale Male and Lola, live on a window ledge overlooking Central Park. In contrast, the Stuy Town pair seem to be their low-rent downtown cousins, but they're gorgeous nonetheless. I've only ever seen them singly and then only once or twice a year if I'm lucky, but this morning for the first time, I saw them both together.

A family of crows lives in the neighborhood as well and the crows really don't like the hawks, and harass them whenever they can. Well, around 10 o'clock this morning the crows really started kicking up a racket, so I looked out the window and sure enough, it only took a bit of squinting to find a hawk in the tree outside. And a minute later, its mate flew up and landed on a branch nearby. Pretty stinkin' cool for Manhattan.

So to all you rural people out there, I say ha! Take your nature and stuff it. I get to have Manolo Blahniks and Wild Kingdom!

That's what I used to call December 23rd when I was a kid. Pretty clever for a 5 year old, huh?

So as you've all probably heard by now, we're going back to work. My official re-hire date is December 26th. The first show will be January 2nd. I hope I haven't forgotten how to do my job, but without writers or scripts, I'm not exactly sure how much there'll be for me to actually coordinate. I'm guessing I'll be doing a lot of sitting around and looking pretty. And since a lot of people have been asking, yes, I was told I'm being hired back exactly as I was before--a full employee.

Now while I'm grateful to have my job back, there are tons of people out there still out of work and my heart goes out to them, especially at this time of year. The LA Times ran a piece last week called "Portrait From The Strike" the subject of which was actor Gil Smith and the affect the situation is having on him. There was one quote in the article that really expressed how I and many other people like me feel about the whole mess.

"I want the writers to get what's due them, but I would ask both sides to go out and see how people below the line are living and how it's affecting them," he (Smith) said.

Amen to that.

Last week, I also read some really insightful commentary over at Below The Line Magazine's online entity. I specifically liked the author's suggestion for bringing in all new negotiators on both sides. Sounds like common sense to me, which of course means no one will listen.

On a more festive note, Mike and I are gearing up for Christmas. We're hammering out the Christmas menu and yesterday we bought the tree. As usual, it's too big for the apartment, though in a shocking break with Kail/Levy tradition, this year it isn't too tall, it's too wide. That picture up top was the one tree we got that actually fit the space, but this year...well, picture that tree, but about twice as wide. We're considering pushing it back farther against the wall so that we turn it into a sort of bas-relief tree. At least then we can get around it. I'll post some pictures once we get the ornaments up.

Hope everyone is having a fun and festive Christmas Eve Eve.

Last night the little elves that run Google Alert told me that Michael Savastano listed my story "Soft, Like a Rabbit" among his top ten free spec fic stories of the year. Cool! Thanks, Michael. I'm so glad you liked it.

I'm still finishing up the Year's Best. Depending on who you count as "new," I saw good stuff this year from Chris Roberson, Ted Kosmatka, Vandana Singh, Neil Williamson, Justin Stanchfield, C.W. Johnson, Sarah K. Castle, Alistte de Boddard, Jayme Lynn Blaschke, Steven Francis Murphy, Marguerite Reed, Ekaterina Sedia, Andrew Kail, Beth Bernobich, and, if they still count as new,Paolo Bacigalupi, David Moles, Elizabeth Bear, and Benjamin Rosenbaum.

As you can see, however, there's a small, one letter typo there that sort of, uh, muddies the water a bit. Oh well. But other posters later in the thread figured out it was me, and hey man, Gardner Dozois said I wrote "good stuff." Can't get any better than that.

But my favorite male doppelganger has to be musician Andrew Kail. My father has been a professional pianist for over 60 years, so I have a soft spot for musicians. Andrew is a guitarist and if you visit his Myspace page you'll hear several of his songs which I think are pretty damned good. So here's a shout out to my evil twin Andrew Kail of Portland, Oregon. Good luck, dude. And many thanks to Gardner Dozois for bringing us together.

And congrats, also, to Aliette de Bodard, my friend from WOTF, who also got named in Gardner's list of promising new writers!

Well, due to the overwhelming (and in some cases quite rude) demand, I suppose I'll have to give in and post about what's been going on with me and the strike and the job and all that.

Mostly the news has not been good. When the guild first struck back in early November, we were told by our EP Jeff Ross that NBC had given us two weeks and if things hadn't been resolved by then, that the network was laying off the entire staff and crew. Not the most heartening of messages, but what could we do except wait and hope that the WGA and the AMPTP would go back to negotiating and make some sort of deal. Meanwhile, every day we all came in to the office (now strangely empty and silent with all the writers gone.) We chit-chatted. We took long lunches. We went shopping and left early. And every afternoon around two o'clock we all gathered in the conference room where Jeff and Conan told us that, nope, they had no new information.

Then some time around November 15th or so, Jeff finally did have news: that after many phone calls and much begging, he and Conan got the network to agree to pay us through the end of the month. We were all ecstatic and grateful and hopeful that maybe this would buy us the time we needed, that maybe by the end of the two weeks things would be resolved and the strike would be over. A little optimistic, but hey, can you blame us? And actually, there was some encouraging news in that regard. About a week later, we heard that the WGA and the AMPTP had agreed to resume negotiations after the Thanksgiving holiday. So as both sides went back the bargaining table, we all sat back and waited and waited and waited some more. But as the deadline of November 30th drew closer, everyone in the office got more and more nervous. Finally, on Thursday, November 29th, at our daily meeting, Jeff announced that since nothing had been resolved with the strike and NBC was no longer willing to pay us, Conan had decided to cover our salaries--all of us--out of his own pocket. There was an audible gasp from the room, no exaggeration, and I can't begin to tell you how grateful we all were (and still are) and so everyone went home that night thinking that we had the best boss in the world and that things were fine and that we'd escaped the headsman's ax once again.

But around 6:30 that evening, we all got a phone call informing us there was an 11:30 AM meeting the next day. I knew immediately that something was wrong and sure enough the next morning in the conference room, several suits were milling about (always a bad sign.) The suits were HR reps. Apparently, Jeff and Conan had assumed that since Conan was paying our salaries, that we would simply continue on as we had been, all of us coming into the office, hanging around, waiting for things to do. But it turns out, NBC had other ideas. Sure Conan could pay us all he liked, was the network's attitude, but they were still laying everyone off. Which meant that our offices were being shut down. Which meant we all had to gather our stuff up quick cause we were locked out of the building as of the end of the day. Happy Holidays! Love, NBC.

For me personally, however, this meant several different things, the chief among them being that since I'm an NBC employee (most people who work on the show aren't. This is how they screw low-level workers in production, by hiring them as freelancers or, more accurately, permalancers) I'm receiving severance instead of being paid by Conan.

Now this whole severance business...in the short term, yes, it's a good deal for me and I'm lucky. Most people aren't getting anything. In fact, most of the below-the-line people affected by this strike lost their jobs and their paychecks back at the beginning of November and have been out of work since. I'll keep my GE benefits, I'll get weekly checks (or so I'm told) and things will generally go on as normal for me. However, just so no one thinks I'm getting out of this unscathed and everything's hunky dory, without going into the financial details, in the long term, I'm going to loose an enormous amount of money because of this strike, money I was planning on using when the show ends next December to fund a year of not working so I could concentrate on my own writing. From the way things are progressing, that dream looks fairly impossible, now. (Irony, party of one?) I can't even begin to tell you how fucking angry that makes me. However, there are many, many other people here in New York and in LA who are much worse off than I am, so I'm not going to bitch. At least not for too long.

And as far as a quick resolution to the strike, as you've probably heard, the AMPTP walked out of talks on December 7th and both sides are back to trading insults. Do the math yourselves.

Now, funny thing, a part of the reason it's taken me so long to write about the strike is that every time I think I know what I'm going to say, something new happens and I'm back to square one. I can't begin to tell you how many posts I've started but never finished because before I could, the whole situation had changed. And of course, that happened again today. In the middle of writing this, I popped over to Variety.com to see if there was any news and sure enough, this morning in LA, Michael Apted, president of the Director's Guild announced that the DGA would wait until after new year and then begin negotiating their own deal with the AMPTP. The DGA contract is up in June and the DGA is known for negotiating well in advance of the end of their contract. This is not the best of news for the WGA basically because if the DGA negotiates a deal with the producers that isn't beneficial to the writers,(and we're talking specifically about new media here) then that undercuts the writers' demands.

So what's going to happen now? Who the hell knows? This announcement by the DGA certainly changes the landscape by putting more pressure on the writers to make a deal. And I suspect (though this is purely conjecture on my part) that it's one of the reasons why the AMPTP walked out on the talks last week.

But whatever happens, the fact remains that there are about 40,000 people still out of work until this strike gets resolved. And here's the thing that's pissing me off most about all of this: everyone and their mother is getting on the "I Support the Writer's Strike" bandwagon, and lots of celebrities are contributing to the emergency fund for the writers, and everyone is making cute Youtube videos, but I have yet to see anyone really talking about all the below-the-line people this strike has put out of work. Very few celebrities have done anything to help us and the few who have decided to stay on the air to protect their people, like Ellen Degeneris and Carson Daly (check out the nasty tone of this piece from the WGA site) have been heckled and harassed for it. Meanwhile Jay Leno had to be publicly shamed into taking care of his staff.

And it's not like I'm taking the producers' side in this. Please! Side with the Rupert Murdochs and the Sumner Redstones of the world? Uh, no. Not in this lifetime. The only side I'm taking is my own and that of all the other people like me who are the real victims here.

So folks when you go to write your next blog post about how you support the writer's strike, could you also please take a minute to acknowledge the tens of thousands of low level, under-paid, below-the-line workers who have no voice in the industry, all the assistants and researchers and casting directors and PAs and APs and script supervisors and script seconds and all the other people who are now and continue to be the bloodied collateral damage in this war between the giant egos. And could you also ask both sides--the WGA and the AMPTP--to please, please, please resume negotiations.

And this time could they all try not to act like a room full of 3rd graders?

Thanks. I really appreciate it.

By the way, I just want to say once more what an exceptionally good person Conan O'Brien is. Thank you, Conan, for your loyalty to your staff and crew. We won't forget it.