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.