Script Frenzy 2009 – Writing a Screenplay in 30 days. Here I go.

When I was about to start my first attempt at National Novel Writing Month, a friend of mine said “Martin, you’ll have no trouble with this, you have a skill for telling things as they are“

“Thanks, but I’m writing fiction”

“Oh.Never mind, then.”

In the same spirit (and organized by the same lunatics) as National Novel Writing Month (every November) is ScriptFrenzy (every April). I participated in ScriptFrenzy in its premiere year and managed to finish a flawed but readable script for a feature film about an insecure superhero investigating a crime involving his former partner who was framed for taking performance enhancing drugs.

This year’s script is for a two-hour pilot for a television drama. It’s set a few years after a mysterious natural disaster which has destroyed every large city on Earth. My characters are (so far) a former Ju-Jitsu instructor turned fisherman turned militia leader, an agrarian bible scholar turned underground spy, a cokehead airline pilot with political ambitions, a fugitive former CIA agent taking refuge with old mafia connections, a shameless disaster profiteer, a teenage girl trying to break away from the UFO cult her family is in, a HAM radio geek turned talk radio superstar, and a cute young journalist who rides a Vespa (her character needs some more depth, obviously).

I’m working under this basic formula, but it’s changing from moment to moment:

(Left Behind – Kirk Cameron/evangelical message) + (Battlestar Galactica – Cylons/Space Travel) + (The Sopranos – pop psychology)  + ( World War Z – Zombies ) + (X Files – creepy sideshow episodes/aliens)

The best thing about writing a TV pilot instead of a feature film is that you don’t have any pressure to wrap things up. I’m going to just open up a whole bunch of messy loose ends and leave them there with an outlandish cliffhanger ending. It seems to work for J.J. Abrams.

After the first two days, I’m off to an OK start. Last night I literally fell asleep at the keyboard and typed an entire sentence with my eyes closed. Upon further inspection, I had to throw it out as it had no vowels in it. Tonight was better and I managed to get up to 8 pages (target is 100 pages in 30 days, so I’m a page or so ahead of schedule).

A big part of making a writing project like this succeed is the visible public commitment to meeting the deadline. This is the same reason that many teams get benefit from doing daily stand-up meetings, is that coders can stay focused more easily when they commit to action in front of their peers. By telling everyone that I’m doing this, it’s a lot harder to just give up silently and go back to watching Hulu or playing iPhone games.

Wish me luck.

Writers who don’t read, software creators who don’t use software, and The Zune Express

I’ve moved this article to the Ministry Of Coding blog.

Direct Link

Maybe it’s just me.

This is probably just me over-reacting as a grammar geek. That, and a person who cares a lot about my dev tools.

I just read the phrase “Integrated IDE” and it really felt wrong to my ears.  Someone who doesn’t know what IDE stands for is less likely to be impressed by an integrated one.  No, “Integrated DE” doesn’t work, either.

So, where is it then?

That’s the obvious question when people see my promotional button (below)

 

 It’s still very much a work-in-progress. I just started last week.

But…why?

It’s a fund raising promotion for 826 Seattle, the excellent free homework tutoring/free writing workshop seminar organization that I’ve done a little work with. Every donation helps them help kids learn.

If you want to make a tax-deductable donation to this good cause (every little bit helps) you can do so by clicking on my smiling face at the official mustache content site.

Total Wide-Eyed Amazement

Last weekend, we did the stage show, “Walking With Dinosaurs” at the Tacoma Dome. It was a lot of fun.

Ethan particularly enjoyed it. Check out that wide-eyed amazement.

And that was before the show even opened, we were watching a few lighting people climb up into their riggings so they could control the lights on the giant dino robot puppet things.

When was the last time you felt like that? When was the last time you did something that so cool that it made people feel that way? I’m currently waiting at the University Bookstore (with one hour and 13 minutes to go) for the new Harry Potter. Maybe I’m too old to get that excited, I’m still pretty stoked.

The run in Tacoma is over now, but if it comes to where you are, I highly recommend it. It’s like a cross between a Broadway play and a monster truck rally, for BBC fans.

Goodbye, iWeb

Years ago, when setting out to make Toy Story 2, the geniuses at a Pixar made a very deliberate decision, “We’re not going to make two kinds of movies, great and not-so-great, we’ll only make great movies.” This is, of course, in contrast with Disney, which was (and still is) releasing admittedly not-so-great sequels direct to video/DVD.

Apple has yet to make that same decision. Even though pretty much all of Apple’s hardware (ignoring some minor failures like the Cube and the hockey-puck mouse) is top-notch, their software comes in two distinct sets, excellent and crappy.

On the excellent side, we have OS X, iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie (people might object to the last two on that list, but I’ll stand by them, they are easier to use and produce better output than their direct competition, if you want more power, you can always use Aperture and Final Cut Pro).

On the crappy side, we have iWeb, which I have just finished moving away from for blogging. I’m on WordPress now, and the level of sophistication and easy of use is like night and day. WordPress is so slick that it actually feels like an Apple product, a good one.

I wanted to like iWeb, I really did. I was specifically interested in the tight integration with iPhoto and iMovie, both of which I use. But the little things, like the sheer difficulty in creating a post: delete the weird snowboarder graphic, select and delete all of the garbage text, actually write stuff, un-bold the entire text (why? why is everything bold?), delete the “forward” and “back” links, select everything and move it up to the space where the snowboarder graphic was.

And there were big things too, I tried to turn on blog comments, and at least one person commented, but it inexplicably stopped working. I published an RSS feed, but it didn’t preserve my line endings, so all of my RSS posts were one giant paragraph. Sorry, I need my paragraph breaks. Trackbacks seemed impossible.

I never figured out how to see, on .MAC, if anyone was actually reading the blog, so I used an automator plug in to add google analytics to each page after I published it. It was a clumsy hack, but it confirmed my suspicion: most of my readership comes from people in Houston, who can’t quite spell “chron.com” and stumble around for a while looking for their local news.

In the meantime, I combined my three separate blogs into one. I thought, at the outset, that my three major interests, software, photography, and writing, were strong enough to each warrant their own blog. I was wrong. It turns out that I am more of a “workblogger” than “photoblogger”, and it’s hard to be a “writerblogger” especially since what I write is always such drivel. So, I’m just going to throw them all into the same pile and use the cool tagging features of wordpress to distinguish between them for anyone who cares.

It has been rumored that there’s a new version of the iLife suite in the works. If there is, I suspect that Apple will move to a more server-side approach to their blogging solution than iWeb’s current “create content on the client and send that to a dumb server as HTML”. Maybe it will wind up looking like WordPress.

Merpeople Writer’s Block

I’m trying to write a (short, 31K words) novel with the students in my class, but I’ve got a solid case of writer’s block. I don’t know the characters well enough, and I’m afraid to let them talk to each other.

I’m so used to just writing sluglines and dialogue that I’m suddenly afraid of my prose. So I’ve just decided to spend some time planning/outlining. I know at least know that I’m going to have pirates, train robbers, and the King of England.

Knowing that only helps a little bit when you’re afraid to write prose, though.

I won! (write a screenplay in a month)

Well, everybody who plays is a winner, but only the people who make 20,000 words get the printable winner’s certificate or the handsome icon below.

It was hard, but I’m glad I did it.

I think the screenplay is awfully readable too, maybe not as good as Optic Nerve (2004 NaNoWriMo novel) but better than any of the others.

If anyone out there in blog-land wants to read it, let me know and I’ll shoot you a PDF.

First writing workshop day

So, I’m teaching a seminar through 826 Seattle called “Write a Novel in a Month” It’s more-or-less based on NaNoWriMo. We’re doing it in July because the local 826 director insists that it’s going to be impossible to get kids to do things in November. She’s probably right.

We had only four of the six scheduled students show up. They weren’t the crowd that I expected, but they seem to be a really bright eager group of kids.

All boys, aged 15-18. Nobody really knows what they want to write yet, which is fine. They’ve got all night to plan. One student is there at the behest of his parents, who want him to improve his spelling. I’m hoping that I can simply improve his confidence and love of literature and have that be good enough.

I did the presentation without any slides at all. I just make a lot of notes in longhand on a yellow pad. Sometimes low-tech is best.

I calculated that I am willing to spend one hour a day on my “NaNoJulyMo” novel, at my self-estimated pace of 1000 words/hour, that makes my personal target 31,000 words.