Participation Survey

I've set up a survey for people who participated in NaSkeWriMo '09. If you've registered at the website you should have received an email, but if not you can click here to access the form.

I hope there will be useful nuggets of wisdom buried in the responses, which I intend to mine and process into Manufactured Wisdom Goods to be published on this blog.

September Sketch Staging!

Party time! Staged reading of your best and brightest sketches.

Ochi's Lounge at Comix
Tuesday September 29th
900 PM

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=134471212839

See you there!

Home stretch!

Hey all!

Great work done by so many people. I'm impressed and inspired and hope you are too.

Don't be discouraged if you're behind...I know I am behind but not discouraged.

The end of the month celebration will be soon announced, in all its detailed glory. Whether you plan to read, submit or just watch please come on down! I can't wait to see you all.

What kind of sketch?

Do you have a particular kind of sketch you enjoy writing?

I'm hooked on commercial parodies. Easy but effective. Some folks like office scenes gone horribly wrong. Others like fantastical characters - two zombies walk into a bar. Relationship humor is a good go-to. Also, any sketch involving Abraham Lincoln.

While I pack and drink my fourth cup of coffee, use one of the above ideas to shake up your sketch writing. Feel free to add yours here or to the Facebook board.

Meet the Writers

By popular* demand, I've added a Writers page to the National Sketch Writing Month website. Now you can find the sketches of any writer, even if they no longer appear in the Recent Updates list on the home page.

Note that you must write at least one sketch to appear on the Writers page. After all, it's not the a roster for The League of Good Intentions**.

* One person's.

** Need inspiration? Go write a sketch with that title.

Follow NaSkeWriMo on Tumblr

I've set up a NaSkeWriMo tumblelog to republish news from this blog and also links to sketches as they are posted. In other words, nothing you can't find elsewhere, but follow it if you'd like to see September's sketch writing activity in your Tumblr Dashboard.

Ways to upload sketches

Perhaps Ben has more insight on this, but basically you can host your sketches in a number of places so you can create a link and upload to the main NaSkeWriMo page:

- your own website
- your own blog
- Google Docs.

Anything I've forgotten?

Hooray!

Day 1 of NaSkeWriMo! And more people are signing up every day - lots of new and old sign-in names (I'd say 'faces' but this is the Internet, and my icon is a cute little south park character).

Thanks to Ben for the new sketch-linking feature. If you have your very own sketch blog, list it in the Comments here and we will add it to the sidebar of this blog.

Join the Facebook group too - lots of encouragement there.

Enjoy!

Gather your ideas

It's Monday, the day of Getting Back to Work, but National Sketch Writing Month doesn't start until tomorrow. What do you do?

You probably have a bunch of sketch ideas lying around, in notebooks, in emails, in your brain. So, gather them into a single list. Then, when you sit down to write, all you have to do to get started is pick an item off the list and write a sketch about it.

You'll probably have more ideas as the month goes on, so it will help if you keep your list portable. If you've got a fancy computer phone, like iPhone or BlackBerry, keep your sketch idea list there. If you're a traditionalist, you can buy a small pocket-sized notebook and keep it with your wallet. Or you could even folder up a single sheet of paper and carry that around: if it's good enough for Earl Hickey, it's good enough for you.

The important thing, though, is be prepared to jot down your ideas as soon as you have them. Your head is not a safe place to keep things. Thoughts are mutated or forgotten in time. They also require effort to maintain, which is why you feel stressed out when you have a bunch of things you don't want to forget in the back of your head.

Tomorrow I'll write about how to turn that list of ideas into sketches. (Hint: it involves writing!)

Forget Final Draft, Celtx is Free

Don't waste your time figuring out how to get a copy of Final Draft, the $250 screenplay editing application. If you're writing comedy sketches you (a.) probably don't have $250 laying around and (b.) don't really need features like "Scene Navigator" and "Page Count Management."

Celtx is an alternative script editor that runs on Windows, Macintosh, and Linux, and it is absolutely free. If you fancy yourself a hacker you can even download the source code and modify it. Celtx is basically to Final Draft what Firefox is to Internet Explorer.

Celtx also allows you to export a script to a nicely formatted HTML file, in case you want to post it online for others to read.

Updated website is live

After being down for a few hours due to the technical incompetence of yours truly, the updated website for National Sketch Writing Month is now online. You can register now to get a passcode and log in. If you remember your passcode from last year, it should still be good.

Last year, the website only allowed you to post the number of sketches you had written. However, lots of people wanted to share their writing online, and did so on their blogs, etc. So, this year, when you post an update, you can provide a title for your sketch and a link to where you've posted it, be it Blogger, Tumblr, Google Documents, etc.

If you're a private sort of person, don't worry: you can still count your sketches without giving anything away. Just leave those fields blank when you press the Add Sketch button.