The Apiary

Sketchfest NYC 2011  has just drawn back its curtains and opened its application window (despite a major hurricane coming right at us!):

SKETCHFEST NYC 2011 APPLICATIONS NOW ONLINE

NEW YORK’S INTERNATIONAL SKETCH COMEDY FESTIVAL TO RETURN FOR A SEVENTH YEAR

New York, September 1, 2010 - SketchFest NYC is pleased to announce that applications for New York City’s seventh annual international sketch comedy festival are now available online at SketchFestNYC.com. In addition to our online application, SketchFest NYC will also be holding Live Applications in New York, and for the first time, in Chicago and Los Angeles.
 
The last six years of the Festival have been a huge success, featuring over a hundred different sketch comedy groups from across North America, sold-out shows, standing ovations, and industry attendance from ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, HBO, MTV, VH1, IFC, Fuse, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, TV Land/Nick at Nite, Discovery Channel, Just For Laughs, Miramax, Tribeca Films, William Morris, ICM and many more.

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I know most of you are focusing intensely on your onion dicing technique for Salsa Slam, but there's another big event happening in September that will require most or all of your free time: it's the return of National Sketch Writing Month.

National Sketch Writing Month, or NaSkeWriMo for short, came about because of a message board discussion about finding the motivation to write. We decided to borrow the idea behind National Novel Writing Month and declare September to be a month for writing 30 sketches in 30 days.

I asked Ben Ragheb, who co-founded NaSkeWriMo with Michelle Dobrawsky, if he had any words of encouragement for writers who are thinking about doing it and he said, "Just try! I'm surprised by the number of people who hem and haw about whether or not to even to try to do it this year. There's no punishment for writing less than thirty sketches. And you get the benefit of having written some number."

He added, "The first year we did this, I figured everyone would want to keep their sketches private, so the website only provided a way to count how many you wrote. But a lot of people asked about posting the sketches online so last year I added an option to post the title and/or a link to the sketch itself and I think it made the whole month a lot more fun.  This year should be interesting."

So start drafting a plan of attack and get sketchin'. Feel free to send us one of your best ones to share here.