Mark Evanier has been blogging about the strike for months, and continues to update on his own site:

About writers being "overpaid": "The first thing to point out is that 'the writers in the WGA' do not all work and that they sometimes go long stretches without pay, writing things that do not sell for a many years or at all. I know the job may look sparkling from afar, and I'm not about to suggest it's a bad one. Obviously, I pick my profession willingly and enjoy it. But the screenwriter who's wiping his butt with currency is the rare exception. Each year, the WGA knocks hundreds of members off its Active roster because even though at one point they had jobs that earned them membership, it's been a long time since they got one of those jobs or grossed even a modest amount in their profession. If you read the stats, you'll discover that the average screenwriter makes something like $5,000 a year, which wouldn't qualify as 'overpaid' in anyone's book. But the situation is really worse than that because there are people who get a million or three per screenplay. And when you have a couple of those guys around, it means there are an awful lot of people making less than $5K for it to average out the way it does."

On what residuals actually mean: "[I]f a Harry Potter book goes into another printing, J.K. Rowling gets another check.… I get payments if an issue of some comic book I wrote in the seventies is reprinted. I get payments if a song I wrote in the eighties gets played again. It is a generally-established principle that if you create something that has an ongoing value — particularly if its reuse competes with new product — additional compensation is appropriate. This is not to say it's always paid. Comic books, for a long time, didn't pay for reprints. A lot of animation work still doesn't pay for reruns. But that's because of the way the financial structure of those fields developed, with creative folks placed at an economic disadvantage and not having the clout to get reuse fees. I don't think it's because they don't deserve them. Residuals exist for a couple of reasons. One is that they are deferred compensation. Let's say you want to hire me to write your TV special and there's no WGA and no residuals and we're negotiating out in the wild. I suggest $10,000 would be a rational price.

You were thinking more like $5,000. I point out to you that this is likely to be a great show that will rerun for many years to come and that you'll be able to sell it again and again and again. If we could be certain it would be, ten grand to me wouldn't seem unfair but as you point out, we can't be sure that it will have all those resales. So how do we resolve this? Simple. We invent residuals. We agree that I'll write the show for $5000 or maybe even a little less, and that I'll receive another $5000 if you can sell it for a second run and then maybe $2000 if there's a third run and $1000 for a fourth and so on. The reuse fees are not a gift to me. They're part of the deal...and by the way, this is not all that hypothetical a scenario. I've made deals with this kind of structure for animation projects where the WGA did not have jurisdiction. Even some pretty stingy cartoon producers were glad to make them because it lessened their initial investments to have me, in effect, share a little of the risk."

From James Gunn's blog:

This strike is absolutely not a matter of the rich getting richer. We're not striking because of guys like me who have made numerous feature films, or guys like Greg Daniels who have created popular TV shows. This is for middle-class writers – your regular TV staff writers and people who may have done one or two small feature films. Residuals are a way they can make perhaps a few thousand dollars a year between gigs. This is a way they can put food on the table and pay the rent during downtime – and downtime is something almost all writers (and actors and directors) have.

And the writers guild are striking not only for themselves – they're striking for the actors and directors as well. Most likely, whatever deal we agree to is the same deal the actors and directors will get when their contracts are up later this year.

None of the TV shows or movies you watch would exist without us, the people who created them, who poured our hearts and souls into the making of them. And yet, again, the studios think that only they should be making the money off of them. And new media is exceptionally important – in just a few years that may be the way most of us experience most of our entertainment.

(Continued on Page Three)