Illness = Slowness... Channel 4 On Demand... Script Frenzy Month

There I was, earlier today, thinking that being ill would help me focus. Pah! I got some journalistic work done, then turned my attention to the second draft of Doomsayer. Made my red-pen corrections, then set about bolstering it in general. Thinking about it, I did a fair bit, but not enough. It's never enough... and I'm starting to feel a slight doubt about this script. Just a nagging kinda 'Does it all hang together?' deal. Maybe that means it's time to get the first Power Of Three people to read it pretty soon...

Channel 4's On Demand service is a bold, forward-thinking idea in principle. You download software which, in theory, lets you (re)watch certain C4 shows from the last seven days for free (unless the show you want is more than seven days old, or a movie, in which case there's a small charge). Problem is, it seems glitchy and primitive, from where I'm sitting. On my first attempt, I failed to stream Peep Show ep 4, then managed to download it and watched it fine. This evening, I've failed to even download Peep Show ep 5. A regrettable business all 'round. C4 admit there are problems with it: allegedly due to the number of users. More likely, it's just full of the same amount of errors and shortfalls as any other Beta software.

Don't know if you've heard about the annual US event National Novel Writing Month, often abbreviated to NaNoWriMo. Its name says it all: each November, thousands of people across the globe pledge to write a novel within one month. Thanks to the motivation which naturally comes from knowing others are suffering along with you, most of them pass the finishing line too. I've never taken part, although I have availed myself of the very handy forum on the site, in which you can ask people for help with general knowledge-issues, ie makes of American car, or how fire behaves.

Anyway, the NaNoWriMo people are expanding this year. Say hello to Script Frenzy! Next month... yes, you guessed it, thousands of people will attempt to write a movie screenplay. So if you need that motivational push to get started on your feature script, or TV feature-length script, then this could be it. And even if you're not interested, it's worth going to their home page to have fun using their Random Plot Generator...