The Office of Letters and Light Blog

The Dream Team: A Q&A with Chris Baty and Jen Arzt

Way back in the day, when many of us were still young and naive, and all the cows in the world were calves, the Office of Letters and Light had an executive director by the name of Chris Baty, and a Script Frenzy program director moniker-ed Jen Arzt. These storied figures came together for this year’s Frenzy as one mega-writing-team, a scripting Megazord, if you will. Taking time from this meeting of their creative minds, Chris and Jen sent us this missive in which they interview each other about first kisses, wooden eyeballs, and the co-writing process so far:

Chris: This is the first time you’ve collaborated on a screenplay with someone. What important life lessons have you learned from working with me?

Jen: Coffee tastes better with a friend at your table.

Chris: Our screenplay is loosely based on an 1890s ghost story we made up involving a vanishing train and a seven-foot-tall murderer with a wooden eyeball. Neither of us knows anything about trains or wooden eyeballs. What were we thinking?

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“I’m Making My Script Frenzy Script!” A Q&A with Stephen Norrington

As Script Frenzy grows, more and more established filmmakers are getting in on the fun. Writer/director Stephen Norrington, best known for directing Blade and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, began shooting his Script Frenzy screenplay in Los Angeles this year. We checked in with Stephen via the interwebs to see how the project was going.

Your current film project has its origins in Script Frenzy. What’s the story there? In 2008 I was developing Clash of the Titans but it wasn’t going well. Warner Brothers were lukewarm on my “vision” and I wanted to rewrite their expensive script. In the six months or so it took them to fire me, I cast around for something else I could do to stay productive. Script Frenzy 2008 was happening at that time so I leapt in, blazing with all the art power that Warner Brothers had squelched. The result was “Untitled Norrington Genre Project #1”, a car chase action fest that turned out great, best script I’ve written in years.

The life-changing thing about the experience was the absolute exhilaration that came from writing whatever came to mind, no need to ask permission from the suits. After Script Frenzy finished I was still on fire so I wrote two more scripts and embarked on two more writer-director development deals. The scripts turned out great but the deals evaporated. In late 2010, I took stock and realized that a) HD camera technology had finally become truly affordable and b) I had the scripts, the know-how, some cash and the time to attempt to make my own movies in-house, no studio required. So here we are.

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Six Crucial Questions for Keith Blount of Scrivener

Each year, we interrogate one or two NaNoWriMo corporate sponsors on the OLL blog. It’s our way of saying thanks for the vital funding that our sponsors contribute to NaNoWriMo and the Young Writers Program. Today, I asked the generous, mysterious Keith Blount of Scrivener some hard-hitting questions about halogen light bulbs, children as coders, and the pernicious rumor that his software contains a virtual homunculus who will write your novel for you if you awaken it properly.

(And yes, that’s Keith in the Obi-Wan bathrobe, above.)

So Scrivener’s parent company is called Literature & Latte—clearly a touching homage to Letters and Light. Do you prefer incandescent or compact fluorescent bulbs?

Well, as much as we do love Letters and Light, “Literature & Latte” was what I always intended to call my bookshop café—but unfortunately I was too lazy to run one, so I applied it to a software company instead. That theoretical café would almost certainly have been lit by energy-saving tornado bulbs with bayonet caps. Mind you, I also have as much of a soft spot for halogen spot light bulbs as the next man.

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The Email That Launched NaNoWriMo

Fast Company magazine has been running an intriguing series called Starred, where they showcase innocuous emails that went on to do surprisingly big things. It inspired me to dig through my old Yahoo! account and see if I could find the email I sent out to my friends in 1999 inviting them to take part in a ridiculous book-writing endeavor I’d hatched the night before. Here’s that email, in all of its exuberantly imperfect glory.

From: Chris Baty
To: friendlist
Sent: Sunday, May 30, 1999 8:51 PM
Subject: national novel month

Hear ye! Hear ye! Come one, come all, and dust off those word-processing devices!

Under the motto “A lousy novel is better than no novel at all,” I have declared July National Novel-Writing Month.

To celebrate, I want to write a novel. In a month. And I want you to write one too.

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Donation Day Thank You!

Thank you so much to everyone who donated or bought something in the OLL store for Donation Day yesterday! In 24 hours, you contributed $51,645! As the parent nonprofit of NaNoWriMo, we’d think it a feat to reach 50,000 units of anything in a short amount of time. But raising that much money for NaNoWriMo and the Young Writers Program makes us absolutely ecstatic. And so, so grateful.

We had over 1,400 people donate yesterday. That’s the kind of grassroots support that most nonprofits would give their organizational eyeteeth for. To our amazing donors on Donation Day and throughout the year—we appreciate you so much, and we look forward to using your contribution to make the world a more inspiring place.

- Chris B.

Today is Donation Day! Hooray!

We’re a grassroots, participant-funded nonprofit. If you believe in what we do, please keep NaNoWriMo and the Young Writers Program going strong by making a donation. Our goal today is $100,000. Thank you so much for helping us give a creative boost to kids and adults around the world this fall!

NaNoWriMo Newlyweds

Sometimes we get emails that are so good we just can’t keep them to ourselves. This email from Jonny in Brighton is one of those. We post it here with his kind permission.

Dear all at the Office of Letters and Light,

In 2009, prompted by a customer at Borders in Leeds, UK, where I worked at the time, I signed up to NaNoWriMo.org for the first time. Not four days into my time looking around the forums, gathering ideas for my first novel and checking out other people’s synopses, I received some NaNoMail from a Bay Area, CA resident named Kristina Casto who was looking for overseas writing buddies and a chance to share her previous three years’ NaNo experience. We got talking on MSN messenger and shortly after on Skype, and soon realised we had much more in common than we thought. By the time NaNoWriMo 2009 was over, Kristina already had plans to visit me in the UK, and we knew we were looking at something special. (Incidentally, I still want to finish my novel from that year, which involved a religion based around the music of David Bowie. It’ll happen one of these days.)

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“I Sold My NaNoWriMo Novel!” A Q&A with Anna Sheehan

Writer Anna Sheehan sold her 2008 NaNoWriMo novel, A Long Long Sleep, to Candlewick Press in the US. Since then, the young-adult novel has been snapped up by publishers in Russia, Brazil, France, Germany, and the UK (where it was bought in a three-book deal). The book came out in the States this August. We spoke with Anna through the interwebs to get the scoop on her internationally adored book.

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Five Launch Lessons

Over the years, I’ve learned to enjoy NaNoWriMo site relaunches the way a winemaker might savor a fine vintage. It’s such a heady mix of flavors! There’s the bouquet of excitement, a slight grace note of terror, all undercut with a peppery finish of ripening HTML code.

This is the second year I’ve had the pleasure of watching relaunch from a distance, as the great NaNoWriMo Program Director Lindsey Grant worked with fearless tech lead Dan Duvall to oversee everything. Not being as directly involved in the process has given me a chance to reflect on all the lessons I’ve learned from site relaunches of years past. I would like to share some of those lessons with you now.

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We’re all moving to Fort Collins.

Last week, NaNoWriMo Program Director Lindsey and I flew to Colorado. It was the first time we’d ever business-tripped together, and we were flying out to throw a thank-you party for the Fort Collins NaNoWriMo region. The FoCo folks gathered over 10,000 books for the drive last fall, which earned them a huge spot in our hearts. And a very large pizza party.

The fiesta, held in the space kindly donated by the Fort Collins library, was so much fun. We met a ton of great people, ate fantastic food, and even got a chance to sample a couple of the locally brewed libations. Before leaving town, we also visited a couple of Fort Collins’ dreamy independent bookstores and cafes.

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Heal Our Jez!

So you know Jezra?

Our beloved web programmer who also just happens to be the Petaluma Whiskerino Sideburns Champion? The guy who saves the tin foil from every burrito he eats and uses it to make an ever-growing aluminum sphere that may soon be large enough to have its own gravitational field?

Yep. That Jezra.

Out of nowhere, Jezra came down with severe muscle spasms in his neck last week, and they’ve generally made it impossible for Jezra to do much more than lie around and be in pain.

We love Jez and want him to get better fast. So if you have the power to heal pinched nerves and muscle spasms through the cyber-ether, can I ask a big favor and have you work your magic now? You’re welcome to lay your hands on the above photo of Jez (who is holding up a piece of paper from which he removed and ate a password to demonstrate effective security measures).

We miss you, Jez.

– Chris B.