12,000 words is around the 70-page mark for me with the percentages of action to dialogue I have. That should cheer you up :-)
You should be using Courier 12-point, 10 pitch
Every character in courier takes up the same amount of space, like using Scrabble tiles. There are 120 'points' in an inch and so 10-pitch (i.e. 10 characters per inch) means they are 12 'points' wide, every one of them - an 'm' takes up as much space as an 'l' whereas most other fonts squish up next to each other e.g.
NORMAL
llllllllll
mmmmmmmmmm
COURIER
llllllllll
mmmmmmmmmm
Once you have that set, you need to format it according to how people expect it to look. There are loads of examples, but the nearest one is probably to click on my name (gzornenplat) on the left and see what I (that is, Celtx) does.
Where exactly across the page won't affect your page count, but the widths of the Action, Dialogue and Parentheticals will.
Make Action between 5.5 and 6 inches wide (i.e. set your overall margins to 1.5 inches on the left and 1 inch on the right or maybe slightly bigger) Try for 5.8 i.e. 58 characters wide
Dialogue about 3 inches (30 characters wide) and Parentheticals
(gives example)
are about 2 inches/20 characters wide. Make them so they look different to the dialogue.
Space the lines out like all the other scripts do. Everything is either single-spaced (i.e. no blank lines) or double-spaced (i.e. one blank line) from the preceeding element.
Some things you don't leave hanging about at the bottom of a page, e.g. you don't have a character name at the bottomof a page, and his first line at the top of the next page.
The people wot give out the Oscars have a guide here http://www.oscars.org/nicholl/format_a.txt
Don't get too hung up about it, but I work at about 170 words per page
Ian
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