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There’s a new app for writ­ing screen­plays and scripts, and it’s open source. Read about it. Download it. Tell me what you think.

Social net­works for writ­ers come and go, but a new one has come.  It’s called Jottify. Like the ones before it, you can share what you’ve writ­ten, find new read­ers, and have dis­cus­sions. It also allows you to create a group, but it seems that the group doesn’t have any pri­vacy settings. 

I still haven’t picked out the defin­i­tive exam­ples of what inter­ests me about this eclec­tic and silly genre of music called “space age pop”.

Meanwhile, I like that I’m able to down­load dozens of sam­ple albums from the space age pop era.

I saw the movie “Close Encounters” tonight. I think I must have seen it before, maybe when I was a kid. It has some things in com­mon with the idea I’m work­ing on. It’s some­thing to think about.

Check out the ziggy star­dust ipad with the extend­able, um, don­gle thingie.

Tonight, I like to think that the fire­works are cel­e­brat­ing the launch of my lat­est project: to raise funds to sup­port Infinity’s Kitchen the pub­li­ca­tion that I started a few years ago. Please take a look!

I had a lot of fun mak­ing this video. I did it with Microsoft PowerPoint, since I don’t have a video cam­era. I think it worked out nicely!

I think that a recent arti­cle in PC mag­a­zine makes an inter­est­ing point about Google+, the new social web app from Google. One of the new fea­tures is the abil­ity to group your friends in to what’s called “circles”.

Among all the inter­est­ing fea­tures of Google+, one of the most heav­ily touted is Google Circles. Circles are what Google calls the var­i­ous groups that you can orga­nize your friends into. Once you’ve got them set up and pop­u­lated, you then can pick which cir­cles get to see the stuff you share. Your thumbs-down review of the lat­est episode of Glee? Probably just your friends. A chat about the com­pany pic­nic? Work col­leagues only for that one. Pics of your three-year-old niece? Strictly fam­ily. You get the idea. This YouTube video explains further:

Although Google holds it up as a dif­fer­en­tia­tor, Facebook actu­ally has a sim­i­lar fea­ture that lets you pile friends together in spe­cific buck­ets — although, impor­tantly, the “share only with these guys” isn’t nearly as con­ve­nient. Google+, how­ever, puts Circles front and cen­ter, play­ing up the premise that you don’t want to share every­thing with every­one. And that idea is cer­tainly true, but Google Circles is still the most mis­guided fea­ture of the new social network.

The main prob­lem with Google Circles is that it’s tedious.

It’s so tedious to do, with Facebook, that I’m sure many users don’t even know that they have the abil­ity to con­trol who sees what. It’s an impor­tant fea­ture, and it needs to be simple.

Offline, if I want to hang out with sports fans, I go to the sports pub. When I want to talk about books and lit­er­a­ture, I go to a read­ing. It’s easy to move around among var­i­ous circles.

Online, I’m expected, by default, to say every­thing I say to every­one I know, reard­less of why I know them, whether they’re inter­ested, etc. That’s no good, and some­body should fix it, and fix it well.

If this arti­cle is still to be believed, we’ll have to wait for a fea­ture like that. This new one isn’t any eas­ier, either.

I’m look­ing to replace my very favorite note­book, which is all filled up now. Unfortunately, they don’t seem to make these anymore.

I’m post­ing this in the hopes that some­one can help to point me in the right direc­tion. I con­tacted the man­u­fac­turer, whose web­site sug­gests that they no longer make these, but they never replied. I’ve done all this because I loved that note­book so much and I want another one.

It is a hard­bound book, with a cloth cov­er­ing of some sort. The spine is sewn such that the open book lays flat. The paper is smooth and thick and white; it is acid-free (I think) and does not bleed through when I use a pen. The paper is nar­row ruled (1/4 in (6.35 mm) spac­ing between rul­ing lines), with no ver­ti­cal mar­gin line. It mea­sures 8″ wide by 10.5″ high and 1″ thick.

This is my favorite notebook.

When opened, my favorite note­book lays flat.

I have filled my favorite note­book with words and drawings

It has a hard­bound cover, with cloth on it

Here’s another inter­est­ing book com­pan­ion site. This one lets you down­load a free copy of the book, if you tweet about it first. It seems like an inter­est­ing way to get read­ers. The book is called OH MY GOD WHAT HAPPENED AND WHAT SHOULD I DO?

For a while now, I’ve been col­lect­ing exam­ples of what I call the “book com­pan­ion web­site”. The new “pot­ter­more” web­site is prob­a­bly going to become a very pop­u­lar one, and if this intro video is any indi­ca­tion, this site will take the whole idea to an inter­est­ing new level.

This sum­mer, I hope to have pub­lished e-book ver­sions of my novella. Today, I hap­pened upon some good advice for any­one engaged in e-book pub­lish­ing. I thought I would pass the advice along. It comes from Levi Asher, over at Literary Kicks.

It’s sim­ple advice, really. I’ll paraphrase.

1. Make it look good. A lot of e-books look crappy.
2. “Formatting an e-book man­u­script is a bitch.”
3. Make an e-book for kin­dle, then make ver­sions for the other devices.
4. Be sure you can find an audi­ence. This is eas­i­est if you’ve writ­ten some­thing you already know peo­ple will want.

I’m sure I can han­dle most of the points above, with the prob­a­ble excep­tion of num­ber four.

Stephen Dedalus is my name,
Ireland is my nation.
Clongowes is my dwelling­place
And heaven my expectation.

He read the verses back­wards but then they were not poetry.

Lately I’ve been read­ing A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It isn’t poetry, but on occa­sion, as in the quote above, it reads like poetry.

I’ve been won­der­ing, too, about stream of con­scious­ness writ­ing. I’m sure that Joyce isn’t sim­ply writ­ing down what­ever hap­pens to come to the top of his head (that’s called auto­matic writ­ing). I think that good stream of con­scious­ness writ­ing has to be crafted, so that it flows as eas­ily as thoughts do, and in the way that cer­tain thoughts do.

Other times, I think it can be a happy acci­dent that the writ­ing comes out like raw thoughts. I’ve had that expe­ri­ence before.

One of the tracks on Strange Punctuation has a sort of stream of con­scious­ness feel to it. It’s a col­lage, actu­ally, made out of parts of sev­eral other record­ings. My friend Curt made the track out of the mate­r­ial that hadn’t yet made the cut. This resulted in one of the more inter­est­ing spo­ken word record­ings; it has a dream­like mood to it, I think.

I’m (slowly) writ­ing the script for a stage play. During my first draft, I sam­pled the var­i­ous soft­ware apps that are designed to help a writer to pro­duce a stage play, screen play, comic book script, etc. I thought I would blog some of my thoughts, in case any­body else out there finds them interesting.

Here’s what I’m look­ing for

When I’m writ­ing, I want a com­fort­able, intu­itive inter­face. I don’t want to fuss around with a bunch of com­pli­cated inter­face con­trols. I don’t want to spend my time on the for­mat­ting of the script; that’s the software’s job. This is very impor­tant to me, because I want to be com­fort­able when I write. It’s worth not­ing too, that in an age when I can buy a beau­ti­fully designed and intu­itive app for $1 on my phone, I’m really not impressed by a $30 pro­gram that looks like it was designed when I was in High School (i.e. Windows 95). Design is a small point in this case, I know, but it mat­ters to me.

I also want to be sure that what­ever I’m writ­ing in this spe­cial soft­ware is “portable” so that I can export it to an indus­try stan­dard file type, change the mar­gins and type­set­ting, or edit the doc­u­ment in another soft­ware appli­ca­tion alto­gether. More tech­ni­cally speak­ing, I need my soft­ware to import/export file for­mats like Final Draft, Microsoft Word, Movie Magic Screenwriter, PDF, TXT or RTF. Why? Because I’m just now draft­ing my script, and I’m unsure what I’ll need to do with it later. I want my options open.

Scripwriting Apps

I tried out a lot of dif­fer­ent apps, with help from demo ver­sions and from friends. Here is a list, in order of my preference.

Celtx

This one tops the list because it is basi­cally free, and totally usable. Celtx is designed to help you write a vari­ety of scripts, includ­ing two stan­dard for­mats for stage plays. The basic pack­age is free. Plugins to add extra fea­tures are rea­son­ably priced. In addi­tion to basic scriptwrit­ing, Celtx also has fea­tures for stor­ing notes, visu­al­iza­tion, for­mat­ting tem­plates… This thing does a lot for free. The inter­face is sim­ple and easy to under­stand. What it won’t do is import/export to very many stan­dard file types, at least not out of the box. They prob­a­bly make you buy a plu­gin for that. I haven’t looked into it. They also have an iphone app, but I don’t want to write on my phone, thanks.

Scrivener

I had a lot of fun using this appli­ca­tion. For Windows users like myself, though, it is still in Beta, so there are some glitches. In addi­tion to “word proces­sor” mode, Scrivener also has tools to help you orga­nize your notes, scenes and even the other doc­u­ments you might be using as source mate­r­ial, etc. I found those extra fea­tures to be very help­ful with my first draft. The Mac ver­sion of this is $50, but the beta for win­dows is cur­rently free. You will want to go through the tuto­r­ial on this one, to learn all the use­ful fea­tures, but then you can get right down to writ­ing with a nice inter­face. Be warned though: once the beta expires, you’ll have to upgrade, so save your work often or be pre­pared to upgrade. The beta can export to most, but not all, of the usual file types.

MovieMagic Screenwriter

Despite the irrel­e­vant name of this app, I liked it. The word pro­cess­ing fea­tures are easy to use. The sup­port for file for­mats is good. MovieMagic Screenwriter han­dles notes and scenes fairly well. It also inte­grates with Dramatica, so you can start there to hash out a rough out­line. I found that this app, of all of them, gave me the best abil­ity to write dia­log quickly, while pre­serv­ing for­mat. Unfortunately, it costs $245.95, but if you’re going to spend hun­dreds of dol­lars on scriptwrit­ing soft­ware, I think this is the best investment.

Dramatica Pro

Dramatica Pro deserves men­tion on this list. It isn’t going to help you write dia­log, etc. but it is a nice brain­storm­ing tool. It’s user inter­face is in very bad need of a com­plete and total over­haul, but once you get the hang of it, it might be use­ful. The soft­ware walks you through a sort of plot phi­los­o­phy that seems to be designed to help you write a Hollywood block­buster, but I found it to pro­vide use­ful prompts for think­ing about char­ac­ter inter­ac­tions and plot com­plex­ity. It ain’t cheap, though.

Adobe Story

This is more like a web app. It sup­ports stan­dard for­mats. Adobe Story is easy to use. It works online and offline. It’s def­i­nitely worth a try. It’s free, for now, I guess?

Final Draft

Final Draft is one of the “indus­try stan­dard” scriptwrit­ing apps. It’s also very expen­sive. For your money, you get a word proces­sor with min­i­mal fea­tures to make it unique for writ­ing scripts. The fea­tures that are there are very pow­er­ful. For exam­ple, the large num­ber of for­mat­ting tem­plates, the char­ac­ter names data­base, and col­lab­o­ra­tion mode. You’ll be able to dive right in, here and get the work done. It’s also worth not­ing that this app’s native file type is a very pop­u­lar one.

There are others…

These were listed on Wikipedia but I haven’t tried them out yet. Your results may vary, so I’ll sim­ply list them here.

• FiveSprockets
• Montage soft­ware
• Movie Outline
• Page 2 stage
• Plot Builder
• Plotbot
• Scripped
• ScriptTeX
• WriteItNow
• MovieWriterPro

If any­body knows of any oth­ers, or has reviews to share, please do post them in the com­metns. As you can tell by now, I’m a win­dows user, but I wel­come my Mac friends to share any notes about the soft­ware they like to use.

I’m gear­ing up to start another project with Second Land. To help with that, I’ll be gath­er­ing some use­ful bits, here on NoCategories, so I can more eas­ily share project notes. The first one: “con­crete music”.

Musique con­crète (French for “con­crete music” or “real music”) is a form of elec­troa­coustic music that utilises acous­matic sound as a com­po­si­tional resource. The com­po­si­tional mate­r­ial is not restricted to the inclu­sion of sounds derived from musi­cal instru­ments or voices, nor to ele­ments tra­di­tion­ally thought of as “musi­cal” (melody, har­mony, rhythm, metre and so on). The the­o­ret­i­cal under­pin­nings of the aes­thetic were devel­oped by Pierre Schaeffer, begin­ning in the late 1940s.

source: http://iwdrm.tumblr.com/post/2911978211