Archive for December 9th, 2009:

On November 30 Electric Literature (about which I posted earlier in the month) launched a bold experiment with author Rick Moody, using Twitter to publish his latest short story in “microserial” fashion. It was Moody’s idea to write a story expressly for Twitter, and the task of writing a narrative that could be transmitted 140 characters at a time turned out to be quite challenging. “I became obsessed with the idea of creating for that character clock,” he told The Brooklyn Ink.

The resulting story, “Some Contemporary Characters,” took Moody five months to write and was tweeted in 10-minute intervals over three days, for a total of 153 tweets.

The project ran into some unforeseen difficulty, however, as the story was being simultaneously tweeted from about 20 other sources (who were invited by Electric Literature to participate), including Vroman’s and other bookstores. Anyone who was following more than one of these Twitter feeds received an onslaught of identical tweets. Also problematic was the decision by many sources to inject the story installments into their regular ongoing twitter stream, so that the story was constantly being interrupted by extraneous tweets.

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