But this can become complicated. It’s also led to some fascinating discussions with four, five, and six year olds. This discussion one called into question why I love Star Wars and why Inception is too complicated to be a kids’ movie. (Don’t worry, there are no spoilers.) Pretty heady for a five-minute conversation with a small child.

The six-year-old: “Monsters vs. Aliens is probably my favorite movie ever. Ever, ever. Well, maybe Cars, but that didn’t have monsters or aliens. What’s yours?”

“Star Wars.” I paused, wondering at my automatic response. Is Star Wars my favorite movie? I’ve certainly seen it enough to quote it — but by that criteria, I can also rank Raiders of the Lost Ark and Back to the Future up there with Star Wars. (All right, I admit it: the accompanying films in their respective trilogies, too, though I have Opinions about them.) What other criteria are there? A movie I would willingly watch on repeat all day long? (Under that category I can add most Disney and/or Pixar animated films; every Miyazaki film; a handful of Oscar nominated films of the last fifteen years and The Sound of Music; a handful of record-breaking blockbusters both of the critically-acclaimed and the revel-in-the-mediocrity variety.)

“Yeah,” I said, “Star Wars.”

“So why do you like Star Wars so much?” he asked. He knows exactly what movie I’m talking about although he’s never seen it. His friends have Clone Wars backpacks. He has a Star Wars: Heroes and Villains Young Reader book. He went to a birthday party where the theme was Star Wars and he brought home a lightsaber as his goody-bag prize. He knows who Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader are. He understands Jedi and Sith. But he has never seen this movie.

“Luke is a farm boy who becomes a hero by rescuing a princess, eluding Darth Vader, destroying the Death Star, and saving the galaxy.” Another pause. Not only did I just give an example of Joseph Campbell‘s hero theory in a happy nutshell, but that same plot is also that of a ton of books and movies (just substitute different nouns).

He stared at me, skeptically, as if to say, “That’s all? Lame.”

I found myself compelled to add, “It’s not just the story. The characters are memorable, the action is great, and there are spaceships, blasters, lightsaber fights, and a really awesome world. It’s got the whole package.”

As I said this, I realized that part of the entire reason I love Star Wars is because it started what became a phenomenon, spawning sequels, prequels, merchandise, books (so many books!), video games — it’s a part of culture, a nerdy subset of American media culture that has influenced a generation (or two, by now) and helped pave the way for better technologies (ILM, THX, Skywalker Sound) that have influenced the way film and media have evolved in the past three decades. Not to mention Star Wars’ pop culture influences. (Just look at the Wikipedia articles.) So it’s not simply the first movie, or the first trilogy, but the entire technological and cultural phenomenon of Star Wars that makes it something I love, something I value and appreciate. I can no longer separate Star Wars the single film from Star Wars the cultural beast. As I realized this, I also realized that while I can admit the original Star Wars isn’t stylistically or artistically the best movie I’ve ever seen (and let’s not discuss the prequels, mmkay?), I can’t separate the film from the context of its time and its place in cinema history. It’s like trying to separate Dickens from nineteenth century London, or New York from its skyscrapers. For a fan of science fiction and fantasy, it’s impossible to separate Star Wars from the consciousness of American media and culture.

I think, at this point, the six-year-old was wondering why I was looking so lost. I was having something of a revelation — Do I love Star Wars because of what it represents more than the film itself? How can I even answer that? — but of course all he saw was a blank look. I have a tendency to get lost in my head and I think by now this six-year-old understands that.

“Oh, okay,” he said. His question had been answered to his satisfaction. “So what was the last movie you saw?”

“Inception,” I said. Without really thinking. Why do I do that?

He frowned. “What does that word mean?”

“Well. In the movie, the ‘inception’ is the idea of planting an idea in someone else’s head. In their dreams.”

“Did you like that movie?”

“Yes. A lot.”

“Why isn’t that movie your favorite movie, then?”

I stalled. That’s actually a good question, I thought. Stylistically, aesthetically, in terms of the effects and the vision, it was pretty excellent. Is it too new to be in my top favorites? Is it too controversial? In the days since, I have read quite a few reviews about it. I’m still wondering what to think, how to interpret it. I kept guessing throughout the movie, throwing my theories against the inside wall of my brain only to see the plot shoot them down later in the film. In a word, though, it was brilliant. “I don’t know. I’ve only seen it once,” I said.

“So it’s about dreams,” he said, going back to what I’d said earlier — did I mention he’s a very smart kid? — “dreaming and ideas?”

“Yep.” And, because I had only just seen it that same morning and I was still itching to talk about it to someone, I added, “It’s about what happens if people can go inside other people’s dreams and change them.”

He grinned. “Oh! It’s a kids’ movie!”

“Oh. No. It’s not.”

“But it’s about going inside other people’s dreams. That’s cool. That could be a kids’ movie.”

I imagined, for a moment, Inception as a kids’ movie and had a wild notion of kids playing with dreamscapes and getting in trouble. Star Wars, I thought, is something of a kids’ movie. But not Inception. Could I explain it to him somehow? Then I recalled the time when the six-year-old, at age five, asked me to explain multiplication and division to him. He’s a math whiz, so I did. I struggled to conceptualize it in a visual way for him to understand. Explaining about dividing apples among children as my example, he understood the principle of division — but didn’t want to try it in practice. (He was five. That’s okay.) Multiplication, though. That was hard. So to explain the complexity of this film to a young audience? One would have to be terrifically gifted or terrifically crazy.

“Maybe. But this one isn’t. It’s too complicated.”

“Too complicated how? You can explain it! Come on, come on, please?”

I really wanted to find a way to level with him, that impulse of being straight and honest with all kids as much as I can. But sometimes, it’s better just to give the simple answer. “I can’t explain it. Why don’t you go set up a game to play?”

“PLEASE!”

I sighed, seeing the look. The I-won’t-give-this-up-because-I-need-to-know-PLEASE-tell-me look. “It’s not a kids’ movie because it’s a grown-up movie. Okay? That’s just what it is.” Christopher Nolan, I thought, you have just made me give a blow-off answer to a small child because of your dastardly fascinating film. Why couldn’t Inception’s plot have been as simple as Star Wars’? But then, I wondered, would I have loved Inception so much had it been simple — would anyone have loved it? Its beauty is in its complexity, as perhaps Star Wars‘ is in its simplicity.

“Aw, okay, fine,” he muttered, then went to set up Connect Four.

Kids these days, I tell you. They make my brain hurt.

Well. Not until yesterday.

Yesterday I was on the L train, where the ambient subway noise is so loud under the East River that I usually have to pause or turn up my audiobook or music in my headphones. But brilliantly, I forgot my headphones yesterday. Neither did I remember to bring my stalwart mass market emergency paperback (usually something I’ve already read) in its little fabric protective cover (for both subway privacy — I can’t stand people being nosy! — and for protection in my backpack). So I was without a way to amuse myself for my commute. My commute isn’t an “easy” one, either: it’s 10 minutes on the L, 5-10 minutes of waiting at the next platform, then 10-15 minutes on the ancient, creaking, and loud C train. Meaning, I can’t snuggle into a plastic seat and read for a good forty minutes. It’s all starts and stops. Half of the time when I am listening to an audiobook, I have to have it paused for at least half if not more of the commute simply because the extra noise is too deafening. (But I never “read” an audiobook for the first time, I always read it first, then listen to it if I can get it from the library or online, to read it again.) Not only are the subways themselves loud, but the platforms are loud (every time any train, even the ones going in the other direction across the way, pulls into the station, it’s all screeches and creaks). So I end up either not hearing half the book or getting annoyed that I have no distraction. Thus, reading is usually my preferred distraction. I can still hear when a train is coming without actually having to stop what I’m doing. I prefer reading during the brief stretches of inactivity throughout the day, too. When I’m on the bus, or when I’m sitting on a park bench, I enjoy being able to pull out a book and dig right in.

Getting back to the point, I pulled out my iPhone while on the L. I browsed through my apps, thinking maybe I’d play a game. Then I realized I had downloaded the Barnes & Noble eReader app because I’d gotten a bunch of free downloads the other day from their website. I started playing with it and opened up Robin Hobb’s Dragon Keeper, which I also own in hardcover but haven’t gotten around to yet. I tweaked the font, size, and page animation, then got to reading. The L stopped, I locked the iPhone and shoved it in my pocket, darted between slow folks up the stairs, then settled on the C platform to wait. I pulled out the iPhone again, and I was still on that same page in the eBook. I kept reading. I read as I walked. I read as I waited later in the day. I sat on a bench in the sunshine in Central Park idly watching the small children play as I continued to read. When someone required my attention — lock. iPhone in the pocket. “Yes?” Done, I pulled it out again, and kept reading. I read a good third of the book across the course of the day. (Helped in part by my ability to simply lock the iPhone and throw it in my pocket when I needed to pay attention to the real world.)

I was so impressed.

I’ve disliked the idea of eBooks from the start because I am one of those people who loves getting ink on my fingers when I tear through a brand new paperback the day of its release. (I get ink on my thumbs and left pinky, from the way I alternately hold it with my left hand or with both hands.) I love seeing my bookshelves lined with colorful spines of much-read books. I love seeing that I have a complete series on my shelf, next to other series. I love the idea of being able to thumb through the pages and find that quick-reference scene or sentence I was trying to quote from one of my dog-eared favorites. I geeked out when I went to a rare book room and got to touch an original version of David Copperfield by Charles Dickens, in the compiled serialized format of its first publication. (I don’t even like Dickens and I was geeking out!) I’ve held a page of the Gutenberg Bible printed hundreds of years ago! (GEEK OUT.) I am a book person!

But yesterday was the first time I could see myself, say, reading an eBook on the iPad and loving it. Or simply reading more eBooks on my iPhone — though admittedly it’s a small screen with terrible battery life economy! I found, despite my love of the feel of pages in my hand, that I really enjoyed the idea of a book on the go. Even more on the go than a book by definition already is. Scary, that.

It felt, oddly, as I felt when I first transitioned to an .mp3 player, when music used to be about having that collection of discs in that folder and carrying that with your CD player, or remembering to throw the right disc into the CD player before going to the gym or the track. How many times did I open my CD player to find I’d remembered the wrong CD! That’s… obsolete now. It’s all loaded on my iPod, my iPhone. If I forgot to update it lately, that’s terrible, but I don’t have the choice of 13 tracks, I have thousands. But I think about the way that music’s shift to digital has changed my life and I try to transpose that to books… books… ah! But see, I don’t want books to go the way of diskettes and vinyl. I don’t want to see magazines and newspapers become entirely digitized. One of my friends, an iPad user, showed me the Wall Street Journal’s iPad app. Embedded videos! Searchable keywords! It makes getting the paper version delivered somewhat silly. But I think: as a teenager I ripped pictures of hot guys out of magazines and taped them to my walls. Will my children copy-and-paste them to their laptop desktops — to their touch-screen digital crazy devices? I see digital photo frames in homes, with scrolling slideshows of family vacations, and wonder where photo albums and scrapbooks have gone. No doubt the digital age has made information safer and more easily accessible — no running into a burning house to save the photos when there are backups stored online — but it’s not… tangible. Not in the same way. That was and still is my big question mark about eBooks. How will it change the way we read, the way we consume books and other media?

Two days ago I could have said I’d never read an eBook and I wasn’t certain I’d like the experience if I tried. Today I can say that while I did pick up the hardcover version of Robin Hobb’s Dragon Keeper (which is excellent so far) when I was home and able to pull it off the shelf, I am planning to read more of it today digitally. This experience has made me curious about eReaders in a way I haven’t been until now. I could have cared less, but now I’m thinking about it. Seriously. Ah! Someone pinch me.

I’m embarrassed!

I’m one of the only twenty-somethings I know who’s relatively shy about social media and meeting people via the medium of the internet. The weird thing is, this seems a bit off for my generation. I’m old enough to remember the Time Before the Internet but too young to have done much phone conversing with friends as a teen/college student — not when there was the beauty, speed, and simplicity of instant messaging, emails, chats, and social websites. (Though I’m too old to be an avid texter. Texts confuse me, mostly, and I am yet again ashamed to admit that.) So because of this, I have absolutely no qualms about lurking about the internet, checking up on friends and learning about new people.

In real life, however, I’m completely different. I can’t sit in a group of people I vaguely know and stay quiet (or at least, not for long). I’m probably too outgoing, sometimes — in that nerdy-awkward way — and when I describe myself as shy, many people who know me in real life laugh — laugh — because definitionally I’m not shy… except, apparently, when it comes to the internet.

Is this a bad thing, though? Perhaps. I follow and I have a really great sense of many people I’ve never met in real life via the medium, but because I don’t engage in a dialogue, they may not even realize I exist. But I’m also afraid, in this internet age of lower barriers to communication, of coming off as too pushy, crazy, or obsessive. (Which, admittedly, I know I may come off as if I really did throw myself into commenting to my heart’s content.) There’s a happy medium, and I’m sure I’ll ease into finding it, but I haven’t found it yet. Baby steps, they say, and that applies as much to this as to everything. I am trying, and I’ve been trying over the last few months, the last year, to really dig into the internet world. I’ll get there.

But until I ease myself into a more active internet social lifestyle, I’ll probably just keep lurking.

Baby steps. Baby steps.

You have quite a devoted following. As you write, do you consider what your fans will think? Is that a consideration?

It’s a consideration, but it’s not the first one. The first one is ‘What’s cool?’ If I think something is cool, then other people will too, because I’m a fan. Something that makes me go ‘Ohh, tingly,’ that’s something that other people will share. I am the audience. When you’re thinking about the fans, you’re more thinking about ‘What do we not have enough of?’ and ‘Where do we need to be next, emotionally?’ But beyond that, you’re thinking ‘What makes me excited, what’s wrong with me, and how cool is that?’ It’s a playground.

What an energizing way to think of writing! As a playground. Obviously the medium of television is different from novels (or films, etc), but all writing reaches some kind of audience. But how conscious are all writers about that audience? How does that perception of the audience change as it grows from something vague (for a new writer) to a vocal group of devoted fans (for someone like Whedon)? I know some writers have added material, gone in new directions, or spurned input from fans when it comes to very popular media with devoted fan followings (e.g. the inclusion of fan-favorite details in the new trilogy of the Star Wars films). I like Whedon’s reaction: he’s not going to shape plots exclusively based on fan reaction, but at the same time, he’s a fan, too…

I’ve been told a few times that as long as you’re writing something that gets you excited and you’re having fun writing it, that eagerness and enthusiasm for the material will come through to your audience. It’s something I notice starkly with my non-fiction (especially in school): when I’m enthusiastic about the subject matter, the manner of voice and tone I adopt to write about it changes drastically from when I am ambivalent or apathetic on the topic. With fiction, the line is finer, and can sometimes vary from scene to scene, chapter to chapter. If one chapter’s writing is sharper, snappier, more exact than another’s, that’s a clear marker for me for revision. Every scene needs to matter to be in the book, but for it to qualify, it really needs to matter on a visceral level.

The bit I quoted struck me mostly because I’m always concerned about my audience — I’m incapable of writing anything without imagining even an amorphous audience. Often I find myself imagining my[precocious know-it-all of a twelve-year-old]self as my audience, but just as often I think of any number of people I know, or have known, reading it and responding to it differently. I’ve heard [a few] writers say they don’t care about what others think about their writing. To some degree, I write for myself, but I don’t only write for myself. I write for the girl I used to be, wanting a book like this to read. I write for the teenager I was, desperate for an enthralling fantasy. I write for every writing teacher I’ve ever had (and yes, I can almost hear their commentary as I edit, recalling what each of them taught me in their own ways). I write for librarians, I write for parents. I write for my family, for their reactions when they finally get the hands on the books I’ve been puttering around in for years. I write for people I’ve never met and may never meet, but who may one day pick up my book and be struck by it. I’m not really even conscious of this…but at the same time, I’m entirely conscious of it.

So what are your thoughts on this? How conscious are you about audience as you write? Does it change depending on your genre or specific project?

“I’m going to the museum later.”

“Oh, really? I love that museum. I used to go there all of the time with my family. I love the impressionists.”

“Me too. I’ve always been captivated by Monet.”

“Monet? Nah, Van Gogh, he’s the real master…”

One could go an entire — fulfilling, polite, engaging — conversation like that, without really asking questions of the other person. I’ve had whole round-tables like this with family and friends. But thinking of Jane Austen and how “polite conversation” is theoretically supposed to work, are we being rude by not asking the polite, requisite questions without which this style of conversation can still happily exist? Are we missing out on something? Are we being insufferably self-centered, all of us?

This volunteering of information rather than asking about it also ties in with the basic “Hi, how are you?” issue I’ve been thinking of lately. How many people say “How are you?” or “What’s up?” sincerely, waiting for an answer, versus saying it as a greeting in and of itself? (The ritual “Well” or “Good” barely counts as an answer, either.) Some people I know just say it as a standard greeting in and of itself.

Thinking of conversations I’ve had with friends either on the phone, in person, or over the internet, usually they start or get around to talking about something one of us said/posted online. For instance, someone changes their Facebook status to announce a break-up or an acceptance to grad school or a change of employment and I’ll ask them about it, and we’ll talk about that already-volunteered piece of information.

Which leads me to wonder: are we all a little bit more self-centered in this age of readily available status information?

Thinking about this the other day, I asked a friend about it. My question had been specifically about writers: are writers inherently self-centered? But as the conversation evolved I wondered, are we all a little bit differently focused in this age? In the world of Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, blogs, online photo albums, family websites, IM, email… are we all, or mostly, living under the assumption that when something important happens to a person we know, they’ll announce it using an internet social medium? When I was in middle school or high school, it was all about IM away messages, used mainly as statuses, as places for people to quote song lyrics that fit their mood, to inform the world of away message stalkers that stuff had happened in their lives. I feel like I was informed about more college acceptances or rejections of my friends that way than the traditional way.

In college, it was similar, but we also then had cell phones a lot more frequently. (When I entered college, only about 2/3 of my friends had cell phones; I didn’t have one to start college. When I graduated, every single person I knew had a cell phone.) Texting became popular over the years, as did the frequency, rapidity, and importance of email as the primary form of communication. I talked to my parents — and still do — more frequently via email than phone. I’m not usually comfortable picking up the phone to call someone, so this change in technology has been really interesting for me, personally.

Facebook came along when I was a freshman in college. It became, and remains, the number one way I have been keeping in contact with my college and high school friends. Without it I am fairly certain we all would have lost touch after those first classes or moments together. But because of it, because of people updating statuses, work information, contact information, we’re all in touch in a way we could not have been a generation ago — scant years ago. And we’re in touch while barely communicating. I haven’t heard the actual voice of many of my friends who live far away in months and years. We talk casually via the internet and social media and that’s it. We haven’t seen or spoken to each other “IRL” or “in RL” or “in real life” — but is that bad? (And what’s real or, conversely, fake, about these online communications?) Does this represent a degeneration of personal communication, or is this an efficient streamlining of it? We can stay in contact with multiple people at once; we can multitask socializing. Is that a good thing?

Are social media changing the way we all communicate? Are we becoming people who are less concerned with asking about statuses of people we know and instead relying on being informed? Is this a less or more effective form of communication? Is it strange? Are we asking less and talking more — and is that a good thing?

Totallylookslike.com has proven that I am not the only person who saw Star Wars: Episode I in 1999 and thought, regarding this, they were filming in Morocco and must have forgotten to bring the prop for the Jedi comlinks from London so one of the female prop masters took her razor, painted it, threw some glued metal pieces on it, and gave it to Liam Neeson and Ewan MacGregor, telling them very seriously to speak into it as if it’s not half a razor. (That was the razor at the time, or at least one of them, and I certainly owned one.)

I feel absurdly validated.

The second reason I don’t really talk about the industry is that I’ve always been a very private person when it comes to a lot having to do with writing. My experience with the industry and what I’m doing regarding getting published falls into that category, too, I’ve found. I just… don’t really want to talk about it with the world at large. I’ll talk to friends or fellow aspiring authors about it but I won’t really go into a one-sided discussion here about it. I doubt I ever really will.

I’ve been thinking about the industry a lot lately, however, firstly because of the current economic climate, but secondly because I’ve finally gotten caught up on reading all of the recent entries of my way too many feeds of blogs written by agents, editors, and authors on my Google Reader. (I just subscribed to a whole bunch of new ones based on a few “best of 2008″ articles and discussions I’ve seen.) I even emailed a question-and-answer blog the one pressing pre-query question I’ve had for ages and she got back to me promptly with a terrific answer (which was… I’m over-thinking the issue. As I’d suspected! I over-think everything. Even this entry!).

Reading and thinking about all of the issues discussed on those blogs ultimately exhausts, inspires, and depresses me, all at once. I come away from reading them thinking of how eager I am to query… then how I’m not ready to yet… and the eagerness comes to a stumbling halt. Which then loops around to me getting energized about writing all over again… then once the eager energy spike subsides I go peruse Google Reader and… well, there you go. The cycle. No wonder I don’t really want to talk about the industry here. I mean, I should be writing fiction, right? Leave the industry speak to the pros.

Currently I’m in the “energized” writing stage of the cycle. I started a brand-spanking new draft last week (I know, I’m terrible!) and I’m hooked on it. It’s… so addictive. But the problem is I really ought to be pounding away at my main project instead, which has been dead in the water since before Christmas (oh, holidays, how you thoroughly threw off my groove). I need to recussitate it and get moving on that and then, I think, take a once-weekly “writing holiday” (as inspired by an article a friend linked me by writer Holly Lisle) and work on the new draft. We’ll see how my discipline holds out. I really need to get a project finished soon, though, or I might go mad. I want to get the ball rolling!

What’s weird about my writing this new draft, though, is that lately the newer the draft, the faster it’s written. It darn near drops out of my head fully formed, à la Athena. The world is unusual, too; it’s not the world of my series. The characters, plot (well, for the most part), backstory, voice have all just come fully realized. (Which is probably due in part to the fact that this draft is the one inspired by a dream I had last month that I woke up from thinking “Oh, that’d make a good novel,” and well, it is, so far.) But it’s weird. Even with the dream — a series of disconnected images and impressions of backstory and character — helping me, I still plunged into the draft taking more risks with plot and scene than I really ever have at any other point (other than NaNoWriMo’s novel). That is what makes it thrilling. Kamikaze noveling! Me, an empty page, and fingers flying across the keyboard. it’s thrilling and it reminds me why I love to write. Where I used to spend pages and pages worldbuilding (and infodumping) and setting the stage for what would happen by chapter three or four, with this draft (and the two most recent ones before it) it happens in chapter one. It’s like I’m writing a screenplay; the action starts early and drives the plot forward with thrilling momentum. Also that and I find I am getting more and more impatient to get to the meat of the story so starting with a bang helps me jump right into the good stuff. Which made me realize — if I don’t find the interesting beginning set up interesting any longer, what exactly about it had me interested way back when? Spending the first chapter setting up the world doesn’t make sense any longer when I know now how to show that world and how to make the world shine by having my character go out into it and look around. This should probably be my approach to writing new drafts of the old stuff. Just set what’s already done aside and start writing those stories I know so well from scratch.

Jeez, I’d intended this to be a short entry. I don’t think I’m capable of an entry that isn’t a thousand words or more… Well. Back to the grindstone!

Enjoy.

If you’ve been redirected from the old blog, Fairytalehero, welcome! Please take note of the new domain; this is where the updates will be happening from now on.

To stumblers: It’s purdy and new and shiny here and this makes me exceedingly giddy, so please excuse the rambling!

Despite having owned this domain for years, I’ve never really used it until this week. I finally got around to getting my own hosting this year (as a holiday gift) and I’ve gone ahead and plowed into this endeavor, despite being entirely (okay, 90%) self-taught in things regarding running a website. (Thank you, Carnegie Mellon, for the rest of that knowledge; the little I actually paid attention to has actually given me more confidence than hardcore knowledge.)

The front page of the site is, more than likely, going to change in the [unforeseeable] future. Knowing that, this blog is over here instead of over there. Oh, the logic is convoluted but sensical, I assure you.

That’s all I have to say for now… oh, not so rambly after all. (What a shock!) Tune in next time for more pondersome rambles; I’m halfway through Robin McKinley’s Chalice, which is shaping up quite interestingly, so I’ll be posting on that soon.

Why am I excited today, do you ask? It’s because Hulu has officially debuted next Thursday’s season premiere a week early. Early! I am thrilled! While I do want to wait… I also don’t. But I will at least wait to watch it with Bryan.

I have to say, SNL Weekend Update Thursday (featuring this sketch, last night) has definitely helped with the lack of 30 Rock on my NBC Thursday night. (Though come to think of it, now that Scrubs is gone, I actually don’t watch anything else on Thursday on NBC. Though Kath & Kim looked funny, I’ve given up on it on live TV — though I will catch it on Hulu.)

I hope all the SNL ratings and interest in Tina Fey as a result of Sarah Palin help 30 Rock’s ratings. For a show that recently won the Emmy for Best Comedy and Best Leading Actress in a Comedy (Tina Fey), it’s historically had some sad (not pathetic, merely sad) ratings. It’s a highly intellectual satire, which makes it something of the antithesis to a lot of comedies and high ratings shows, but it’s so terrific.

On a similar note, the season finale of Mad Men is this Sunday and Jon Hamm is going to host this upcoming Saturday Night Live. Mad Men‘s ratings have been sad, even for a cable show (just under 2 million including DVR folks), and though they have a 3rd season in the works, who knows what will happen after that. The show isn’t cheap to produce (all of that period stuff!) and they aren’t on the largest network, but it is a terrific show that, like 30 Rock, just won the Emmy (this time for Best Drama). I hope people come to its 3rd season with a renewed fervor.