Dear Mr. Spam Man,
Thanks for letting me win the lottery three times a week average. I don’t deal in Euros, Dollars or Yen though, so I’d appreciate it if you could actually just send me my winnings for the draw that I actually didn’t enter in a suitcase or bag marked “SWAG” in Pounds Sterling. Ta.
Cheers also to the lovely fellows with unpronouncable names who say that because I am “obviously” a good Christian, they can trust me to look after their squillions of pounds whilst they run away from oppressive regimes and gain asylum in the UK. Whilst I would be more than happy normally to accomodate your money, unfortunately I have way too much of my own because of the lottery winnings that are coming, so my account is actually full up. What do you know!
And finally, to all the others, I don’t want to look at your dubious You Tube link and nor do I have a “dragon” that needs to be harder. In fact my dragon Terry went to anger management classes only last year and is over all his behavioural issues now (what?). But ta anyway.
Much love and f@*! off,
Your spam recipient x
OK OK… the broken English and bizarre subject headers have finally palled.
Send those ones on intended for your dragon to me. Mike could do with ’em.
Ha, you mean you could bro. And since when was “dragon” slang for your wanger anyhow?
Luv Mike
Dunno! But I’ve had about 7 in the last week: “Make your dragon hard”/”Does your dragon wilt”… Maybe it’s an American thing?
And do I need to remind you boys a) not to fight on my blog and b) being twins if one of you has a problem in the downstairs area, the other is *bound* to???
You’d think so wouldn’t you.
He weeps my friend.
Yeah. With laughter…
Luv Mike
Oh good grief. Anyone sensible out there….?
Well there’s me. Here’s a sensible question for you:
how in the name of Christ do you get Final Draft up and running?
any thoughts appreciated!
Do you mean, how do you install it, Anya? Or do you mean, how do you start a document in it? (I have many gripes about FD but getting going with it was never one of them.) Oh, and are you on PC or Mac and what operating system because that might make a difference? (Now watch – I won’t be able to help after all those questions. I can feel it coming… oops, now I sound like a Dragon Spammer…
Thanks Liz…I CAN open a new document, but according to the instructions you can import docs from stuff like Word into Final Draft and that’s what I’m wanting to do but can’t figure it out.
Oh – and I have a PC. Sorry!
Anya: Open it in Word first, then save it as an rtf file – File, Save As, choose “rich text format (rtf)” from the file type box, then hit Save. You can then open it in FD, and it’ll ask if you want to convert it to sript – say yes!
It’ll still probably mess up some of the formatting, so you’ll need to check through it to make sure. But it gets it in. Oh, then save it as a FD file, before you do anything else.
Just to add – if you do need to do any reformatting, you can use ‘Reformat’ on the Tools Menu, which will bring up a wizard that will run through each element in your script and let you change it with one keypress. I find this fastest. But you can also just put the cursor in the bit that needs reformatting (highlight the whole thing if it goes over one line) and then change the element using the dropdown box on the top toolbar. This might be quicker if you only want to change one or two things. The advantage of the first method is that it makes you go through the whole script so you don’t miss anything.
Ah-hah! An opportunity for me to drool my undying love for Final Draft! It is the easiest-to-use software ever. Easier even than Word. It makes writing as fast as thinking, and results in an impeccably formatted script. I love my Final Draft and will meet anyone who dares to impugn it with swords at dawn.
Dave Anderson
This last patch seems to have got it to be stable. When I first got it, it was seriously crashy. I once used the index cards feature to work out the structure of about three quarters of a feature script. Damn thing crashed and I lost the lot, despite having autoback up set to save every couple of minutes. (It crashed and put up a message telling me to save in RTF format and all would be well; so I did, and it wasn’t – I guess it might have been if I had just been writing a script. I haven’t used the index card feature since so I don’t know if it’s actually more stable now or I just haven’t triggered its bad-boy behaviour.)
Thanks everyone! I’ve managed to do it as per James’ instructions. How exciting, Final Draft advice from a real scriptwriter! My own writing is bound to improve tenfold.
Thanks Liz as well!
They know you’re a writer, and are offering their services to stiffen the resolve of the Dragon Claw Fire Horde.
Cos with the opposition they’re fighting, they need to be pretty damn hard.