While your word processor’s spell checker will help you catch a typo when your fingers are blazing away at the keyboard and you accidentally type too many letters, it will NOT correct words it recognizes that are sorely out of context.

This is a lesson the Associated Press learned recently when they ran a story earlier this month describing Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman as “the Democratic vice presidential prick in 2000 who now is an independent”.

While they meant to write “pick”, the typo made its way into early online editions of the Houston Chronicle, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and Cleveland’s Plain Dealer. Then again, you have to wonder as the letter “r” is nowhere near “p” and “i” or “c” and “k” on a standard keyboard.

You can read more about this story, covered by Editor & Publisher, here.

“You only get one life so you might as well make it a happy one, and that’s why I tend to just jump into things. I’m sort of a fearless idiot that way.” — Nia Vardalos

Joe Eszterhas, the screenwriter behind Flashdance, Basic Instinct, and Showgirls, presents a tongue-in-cheek look at screenwriting in The Devil’s Guide to Hollywood: The Screenwriter as God! that is part autobiography and part Rough Guide.

Eszterhas shares his tips about surviving Hollywood in acerbic, bite-sized paragraphs that unabashedly praise the people he loves and mercilessly rip into those he loathes, while offering some gruff but friendly advice to both working and wannabe screenwriters.

Here are just a handful of tips I thought I’d share:

Cover yourself.
“Before each sex scene, write: ‘It is dark; you can’t see clearly.’ (Do this) just in case the director wants to shoot your script as NC-17 or ‘a deep R’… and blames you for pornography if the movie fails.”

Use the three beat.
“Three lines of dialogue - the last line (the three beat) pays the first line off.”

Shut the world down.
“I have found that for me, the best time to write is from seven in the morning till one o’clock in the afternoon. I get up at six, shower, drink some carrot juice and tea, and am at my writing desk by seven. I don’t take calls when I’m writing: my wife only disturbs me for emergencies.”

Write six pages of script a day.
“Stick to this schedule no matter what. You’ll have a finished first draft in roughly twenty days. Then go back and edit what you’ve written. Spend no more than five days on this edit.

Then rewrite your script from page one - with your edits. Spend no more than one week on this rewrite - that means twenty pages a day. Put the script away for a week; don’t even look at it. Then edit it once again. Spend no more than four days on the edit this time.

Then rewrite it again from scratch with your edits - taking another week. This will be your third draft. Now begin the process of trying to sell it - this, your official first draft.”

Screenwriter David Goyer discusses his attraction to darker themes and conflicted characters in The Dialogue: Learning from the Masters, a DVD I recently picked up given I really enjoyed his work on films such as Blade and the very creepy Dark City.

While this series seems to be aimed at more novice writers, there are still some notable tidbits, especially if you’re planning on writing a comic book adaptation:

“You have to be very careful about what you choose to change and not change. The (films in this genre that haven’t been) successful veer away too much from the source material,” says Goyer, who adds that one can get away with a lot more by adapting lesser-known properties, such as Blade.

The writer of this summer’s Batman sequel, The Dark Knight, also talks about his experiences working on a number of blockbusters (Batman Begins), as well as a some of the more forgettable projects (Death Warrant, Demonic Toys) he took on to break into this business early on in his career.

He also discusses the importance of creating your own discipline (when it comes to finding a fixed time to write), the advantages of cannibalizing your own unproduced work for inclusion into a current project, and the need to outline:

“The few times I’ve tried to dive in I’ve become hopelessly lost around page 40 and just fall into despair. I usually write a 30-page outline.”

If you’re working on a screenplay or teleplay that features an evil genius as an antagonist, you might want to visit Peter Anspach’s Evil Overlord Inc. for a few tips that will give your villain a fighting chance, and bust some common clichés in the process.

Anspach’s hilarious list – which originated on an early Internet mailing back in 1994 – looks at the common mistakes evil geniuses and overlords make when setting up their secret hideout and capturing their nemesis.

The list includes such gems as:

* I will design fortress hallways with no alcoves or protruding structural supports which intruders could use for cover in a firefight.

* I will not grow a goatee. In the old days they made you look diabolic. Now they just make you look like a disaffected member of Generation X.

* My Legions of Terror will be trained in basic marksmanship. Any who cannot learn to hit a man-sized target at 10 meters will be used for target practice.

* I will not shoot at any of my enemies if they are standing in front of the crucial support beam to a heavy, dangerous, unbalanced structure.

* If I am fighting with the hero atop a moving platform, have disarmed him, and am about to finish him off and he glances behind me and drops flat, I too will drop flat instead of quizzically turning around to find out what he saw.

There’s 100 clever observations in all, but only breaking one of these clichés in your story is bound to add some originality to it.

I love using my MacBook Pro while working outdoors, but its underside does get hot sometimes, especially when the outside temperature peaks. As such, I have to always make sure to keep it raised up a bit, in order to keep it cool.

Normally, I use Rain Design’s wonderful iLap at my desk, which features an angled anodized aluminum base to support a laptop computer and keep it cool. However, while this ($45 to $63) base sure is stylish, I find it a little too bulky to fit into my laptop bag at times, so it usually just stays on my desk.

Recently, I came up with a more cost effective and pretty ingenious (I think) solution to keep my laptop cool when I found myself without a much-needed cooling base while traveling.

I simply purchased a cooling rack – the kind used to cool off cookies, pies, and cakes – and set my laptop on that.

While this three dollar purchase gets me a number of odd looks when I first take it out of my laptop bag – it’s thin enough to fit behind my laptop and add extra support to it – people around me quickly see the “clever logic” behind it, and often ask me for the “name of the specialty store” where I found this “chrome device”, so they can buy one.

They’re usually even more surprised when I tell them they can find a number of sizes wherever kitchen gadgets and baking equipment is sold, or buy a pair at Amazon for about six bucks. Plus, you can use it to make cookies.

Among the courses I took at UCLA to earn my TV writing certificate, I completed a ten-week long Podcasting for Writers class. The course not only covered the basics of developing and marketing a podcast, but went into great detail about the scary technical stuff that might otherwise make one think twice about podcasting.

I highly recommend it. Podcasting is another (overlooked?) medium writers can use to not only promote themselves or their websites, but create fresh and original content for: interview and variety shows, sketch comedy, radio dramas, etc.

As part of the course, I had to put together a podcast, too, and created a companion piece for this website. You can listen to my final project, SopHok - The Podcast, by clicking here. Please note that the content might seem a little dated, as it was produced back in December.