Have Faith in Your Government

Even the Treasury, it seems, is not without a sense of humor. Included with my refund check (WOOHOO!) was an informational flier with the title "Don't Be a Victim of Predatory Lending or Other Bad Deals," which at first glance seemed like a thoughtful thing for the Treasury Department to include in this Era Of Madoff. Further inspection, however, revealed this delight in small print at the bottom:

For more free information, the U.S. Department of Treasury invites you to: visit www.mymoney.gov or text* "smart" to 22122 on your mobile phone.
* Standard message rates apply. Other charges may apply.

Now, if you're like me, and you stay up way past your bed time watching television programs that you could probably live without, you're well familiar with what "other charges may apply" tends to mean. For the uninitiated, it means that the recipient of your text will not only sell your phone number, they will also automatically sign you up for their own dodgy subscription service at an outlandish monthly rate. It seems like kind of a bad deal to me that the Treasury Department has been reduced to such practices to pay off the bailouts, but I guess everyone's just trying to get by as best they can these days.

Jerks.
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April madness

Why???

Script Frenzy: 100 pages of screenplay in the 30 days of April. Or, in Eliza's case, a 50,000-word novel in the 30 days of April. That's 3.3 pages of screenplay or 1,667 words of novel per day. It can be done, people. It has been done and it shall be done, and it is a fantastically productive way to pass time, but MAN is it tough!

For my part, I'm attempting to write 100 pages worth of comedy sketches. Or sketches, anyway. I'm on track page-wise, but I refuse to vouch for the quality of the product. That's not what it's about, after all. Screenplays can be punched up later, real jokes can be added, endings can be re-written - the important thing is to push through this month and experience the creative breakthroughs that inevitably happen if you just keep writing.

If for some reason this sounds like fun to you, it's not too late to start! This is my third Script Frenzy, and I've done the National Novel Writing Month a couple of times, too, and each time I've hit the goal without writing every single day. Sure, it makes a few other days just a tiny bit more difficult, but it all evened out in the end.

Regardless, if we seem a bit quieter than usual this month, Script Frenzy/NaNoWriMo might be the reason.
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