There’s this guy who has set out to tweet an entire novel. Here are the salient points.
- He is tweeting 5 or 6 days a week.
- He started on 1/11/11 and intends to finish on 11/11/11, so it’ll be 10 straight months.
- It appears that he tweets more than once a day. (Looks like about 100-150 words per day, according to his website so far.)
- It’s about a girl who lives on the streets in Berkeley, and she gets a cell phone and starts tweeting. Apparently the point is that it will circle back around and be about the redemptive qualities of social networking.
Here are things I don’t like about it.
- That I didn’t think of this first.
- That he’s writing it day by day…I feel like if he doesn’t plan ahead and outline at least a little bit, how is he going to create a good story? I suspect reading this will be a waste of my time.
- I don’t really care for all the text speak. I get that the medium is twitter, but it’s obnoxious to read all the 4s and 2s and Us and Rs and thxs, etc.
- So, doing the math…there’s no way this thing can be much longer than 25K. That’s not a novel. So I wish he would stop calling it a novel.
This is a really interesting concept and now it’s something that I’m just thinking about, in the way you just let things marinate. I think it could be a really amazing way to “publish” something.
I’m reluctant to put his website here, because I don’t want to give him any traffic, lol. This is an awesome concept and I love the idea that the book speaks to social networking bringing about redemption. So it bums me out that a) so far I’m not impressed with the writing or the story, and b) he’s hardly committing if it’s only 10 months and less than 30,000 words.
But, his website is tweetheartnovel.com, and you can follow him on Twitter and get all the text-speak updates if you want. (I’m not.)
The Cameraphone Diaries 
One reply on “I hate when someone else gets the good idea first”
I, also, hate when other people have good ideas. What does that say about us? Justin did something similar to this in that his novel was posted as blog entries. He went as far as to create a fake personality with a facebook and everything. I thought it was brilliant, but I still think it mostly worked because it was safely within the gay demographic and that he sex’d it up whenever possible.
It all makes me wonder if I should be coming up with some crazy way to distribute the next thing I write (like should I graffiti a different wall each night and then tweet the walls location?). Does art have to make a splashy entrance nowadays?