My past participation in NaNoWriMo exposes me to a few related things, including Script Frenzy, which is a project to write a 100-page screenplay within one month. I don't have the time to tackle such a project this year, but I did at least take a peek at the information about it, since I've been "sitting on" a couple screenplay projects (one short, one feature length).

Thanks to that bit of curiosity, I ran across celtx, which is free (open source) software for writing screenplays. Wow! I wish I'd found this earlier! It makes working on a screenplay so easy that my first experimentation with it took me directly into making the first real progress on my short screenplay project. It's not just a word processing template -- I downloaded one of those, too, for OpenOffice.org, but a template just helps with the script itself -- it doesn't provide an integrated database of characters, for example, or a scheduling tool for production purposes.

Now that I have such an easy tool to work with, I have to force myself to not sit down and write more on the short screenplay. I really don't have the time for it right now! But forcing myself to not write is a 180-degree turn from forcing myself to sit down and get some work done on one of these screenplay projects.