I love using my MacBook Pro on the go (such as working from a nearby coffee shop), but its underside does get hot sometimes, and I’ve often struggled finding a way 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 ($49 to $70) 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.

Griffin also makes a nice laptop stand (the Elevator) for about $30, but it’s also a bit awkward to take with you, and requires using an external keyboard.

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 five 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 just under ten bucks. Plus, you can use it to make cookies.

“A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end… but not necessarily in that order.” Jean-Luc Godard

More lists. While doing some cleaning up this week I found the 2009 spring issue of Canadian Screenwriter (the journal of the Writer’s Guild of Canada) that has a great article about writing spec TV scripts, and “how to show what you know”.

It features a number of prominent Canadian writers, agents and producers commenting on Jane Espenson’s “ten commandments for spec writers”, explains them in depth, and adds a few bonus rules to that list.
Espenson, if you didn’t know, is a former writer for Buffy The Vampire Slayer, and worked as a co-executive producer for Battlestar Galactica. Her list says:

• Don’t spec a show you don’t respect.
• Don’t make your spec about a guest character. Focus on the main character.
• Get sample scripts of produced episodes. Study them.
• Follow the show’s structure exactly.
• Find a story for your spec that plays on the show’s main theme.
• Don’t write an episode that resolves the show’s mystery or consummates its romance.
• Place the story turns at the act breaks, and give us a reason to come back after the commercials.
• In a comedy, spend time polishing the jokes, especially the last one of each scene.
• Spelling, formatting, clarity of stage directions – they really matter.
• Use strong brass brads.

The WGC suggests the following five rules are equally important:

• Use surprise and motivation.
• Never send the spec to the show that you’re specing.
• Write stand alones.
• Choose your show with care.
• Consider using a feature spec or writing an original pilot instead.

The article also suggests that 2009’s specs of choice were House and Dexter for procedurals, Mad Men and True Blood for dramas, 30 Rock, Weeds and The Office for comedy, and Two and a Half Men for traditional sitcoms.

The Gotham Writers’ Workshop came up with a neat list of 10 screenwriting tips by Billy Wilder that they culled from the book Conversations with Wilder by Cameron Crowe.
The late Wilder, who co-wrote Sunset Blvd., Some Like it Hot, The Apartment and Double Indemnity suggests the following:

• The audience is fickle.
• Grab ‘em by the throat and never let ‘em go.
• Develop a clean line of action for your leading character.
• Know where you’re going.
• The more subtle and elegant you are in hiding your plot points, the better you are as a writer.
• If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act.
• The event that occurs at the second act curtain triggers the end of the movie.
• The third act must build, build, build in tempo and action until the last event, and then—that’s it. Don’t hang around.
• A tip from Ernst Lubitsch: Let the audience add up two plus two. They’ll love you forever.
• In doing voice-overs, be careful not to describe what the audience already sees. Add to what they’re seeing.

Speaking of The Warner Bros. Television Writers Workshop Guide, I should add that this book is a very straightforward introduction to TV writing by Abby Finer and Deborah Pearlman.

Aside from explaining sitcom and one-hour drama writing basics, this book also offers some nuggets of wisdom I have not read elsewhere.

The authors suggest a television spec script should NOT revolve around a holiday or deal with life-changing events. They also suggest avoiding stories that feature long-lost relatives, or natural disasters (including blackouts).

And while they stress the importance of not writing a “special” episode that deals with “addictions, amnesia, or dream sequences”, which I have heard before, I was surprised to learn that some producers dislike it when you show off your knowledge of a show by throwing in little-known facts or back story.

They also offer some good advice to help you determine just how important a particular scene is to your story:

“Each scene must advance the story, so new and relevant facts need to emerge, giving the character something to talk and joke about. A good way to test the sequence of the story by scene is to remove a scene that might not be fitting in with the rest of the story. If you remove a scene and the story still makes sense, then you didn’t need that scene in the first place.”

Finer and Pearlman also stress that you need to track “characters as they enter a scene thinking or feeling one way and wind up with a slightly different attitude by the end of that scene.”

They also suggest exposition “can be inserted into dialogue through conflict, particularly when tempers flare and angry words are spoken”.