I’m tentatively going to have a go a NaNoWriMo. I don’t hold out great hopes of finishing, but when I realised that I only needed to write 1666 words a day, it didn’t strike me as too much of an arduous task.

I figured that 50,000 words wasn’t in the realms of War and Peace, but should provide a decent short first draft that could easily be adapted into a film. If nothing else it should help my touch typing speed.

I’ve got an idea of what I’m going to write, someting I plotted out while on holiday last year which should, I hope, might make a decent fantasy story.

Watch this space…

As I was between projects, editing-wise, I took the plunge and upgraded to Mac OS X Leopard as soon as it arrived at my door today.

The upgrade was incredibly smooth, and the only casualty seems to be Dramatica, or moreover, the Pace security protection software it uses. I’m sure it’ll be sorted in due time. Otherwise, all seems well. Screenwriter 6 appears to be fine, as is Final Cut Pro 6, so I’m happy.

It definitely appears to be a worthwhile upgrade, the key points for me so far are the speed increase – it’s significantly faster than 10.4 – and cover flow in the Finder – really, really useful.

Other features which are cool, include the new make-a-widget-from-a-bit-of-a-web-page function in Safari. I tried it on the Scribomatic widget, and it worked very well. Only my funky javascript scrolling seems to have gone a bit wafty as when you drag the widget to start the scrolling again, insted of scrolling, it just moves the widget about – so I might have to revisit that.

The new dock is quite sexy (as sexy as docks can get, anyway), especially the new icon for System Preferences. I’m not sure how useful I’ll find Spaces, the feature has been part of most Linux distributions for a long time, and I never really used it very much back in my Linux days. I think the family might find it all a bit confusing.

Mail has some very useful additions, and stacks seem to be very handy – I like the idea of keeping my desktop clear of clutter.

I also splashed out on one of the new Apple low profile keyboards. The enter key looks dauntingly small, but I don’t seem to be having any problems with it. I read a couple of reviews saying touch typists wouldn’t like it, but I’m having no bother with it – my fingers are veritably skipping across the keys.

My only issue with it is the function keys are all in a different place, but at least they are nicely iconised now, so it’s hard to forget where they are. The addition of the iTunes controls is very welcome.

All in all, well worth the money.

Today we had the premiere showing of Greetings at BAFTA (or apparently, 195, to those in the know), which was an exciting thing. About 20 of us headed into their little screening room as Ken presented both Alligator and Greetings. Both went down very well.

For a film shot on DV Cam, Greetings looked really good. It was hard to tell how much better the grading work Paul Miller had done made it, but it looked great.

One big problem we had was the sound. I don’t know how, but during the transfer over to DigiBeta my beautiful mixing seems to have got muddled so that the dialogue tracks in the FCP project were forced out to the left and right channels. So as people spoke, their dialogue kept bouncing back from left to right. Really annoying. As soon as I got home I checked my version of the film, on the Hard Disk that Ken had only just returned to me on Saturday, and it’s just as perfect as when I handed it over to him.

He’s probably not reading this, but I’d like to say thanks to the nice technician chap at BAFTA who tried several ways to fix it, even though they didn’t work.

Barring that the screening went well. I met a few more of Ken’s actor friends, and also finally got to meet Mel Stephenson, who plays one of the leads in the film. It’s the most bizarre feeling on earth to be confronted by someone who doesn’t have a clue who you are, yet you feel like you know them really well because you’ve spent every night for six months with them.

She was taller than I had imagined, and, as it tuned out, a lot nicer than the ‘hormanal bitch’ she plays in Greetings.

Some of you may recall a few months ago I created a wee site call Scribomatic, and, after a few people commented on how useful it was, it seems to have been promptly forgotten about.

Day after day, I kept checking the Google Analytics stats – 3 visitors… 4 visitors… 9 visitors… 2 visitors. And so it went.

It had been bugging me why more people didn’t use it. How could I improve the visibility of the site? Admittedly, I hadn’t really pushed it at all, despite using it regularly and constantly being impressed with how useful the search engine features were.

Then, Tuesday night, inspiration struck…

A couple of weeks ago Unk had given me the heads up about Blogrush, which I had thought was quite cool, even though the roll out of it over the past few weeks seems to have been a little shaky.

Then this week Stewart McKie mentioned to me about the Cliq widget. Again good stuff, but between Blogrush and Cliq, there were two extremes of the spectrum – the Blogrush widget with loads and loads of blogs, not all screenwriting related (though they have promised more categories, so that might change) and the Cliq one, with a select few.

What was needed, mused I, was something just for Screenwriters only. One that wouldn’t need a sign up (I can’t stand having to sign up to these things to use them). One that was already populated with the majority of screenwriting blogs out there preloaded…

Slowly the cogs turned in my brain.

What… if… I… created… a… Scribomatic… widget!

Gaaaaaah!

Then it would be on people’s web sites and they wouldn’t forget about the site, in fact they could search from the widget and what’s more they could see all the latest posts that the site was diligently storing away (for what purpose I hadn’t actually been sure, but it had).

180 odd Scribo-blogs, plus a further 70 or so Screenwriting related web sites.

It would do the Blogrush thing of giving visibility to everyone’s blogs and (hopefully) help drive traffic to them, but with the Google powered search added in, it would be invincible!!! Mwa ha ha!

So excited was I that I set to work immediately.

Now – four very late nights later, it lives!

Check it out either to the left of this post if you’re reading this on my web page, or on the main site at www.scribomatic.com.

To say I’m really pleased with it is an understatement. It’s feature rich, it seems to be stable (though please let me know if you find any ‘undocumented features’) and it’s, well, quite funky really.

However, I have found a teensie little drawback with it. Not the widget itself, but the concept – and this is where you guys come in.

Because all of the scribo-blogs I can find are already on there, it means that really, no one has to do anything about it. However, if you want more people to come to your site (and let’s be honest, if we didn’t, why on earth did we start blogging?), then we kind of all need to use it. The more web pages it appears on, the greater the visibility of our posts.

The fact that the search facility is on there as well is added incentive to give it a try.

And it’s as customisable as I could make it – with a splendid range of colour schemes, changeable size and various formatting options (I’ve even built a little configurator so you can play and get it looking just so before you use it!).

Please let me know what you think of it, and if you’ve used it in your web site/blog (as I don’t think I can actually track that – though GA might come up trumps again).

And now… sleep.

If you’ve seen either of my two shorts, you’ll have seen a certain chap called Ben Shockley. Recently Ben’s been very busy adapting Thomas Cullinan’s ‘The Beguiled‘ for the stage, and should you find yourself in the Islington area at 7:00pm between October 9th and 13th, with little to do, you could easily pop down to the Hen and Chickens Theatre to check it out.

Ken’s been involved with the production and it’s being directed by Steve Hubbard.

Ken also had some news about the showing of Greetings at the Kino in Hawkhusrt. Looks like we’re going for a Friday night (probably 26th October or 2nd November) which is very exciting…