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Twitter is not especially well-known for fiction. But maybe that will change. Writers are embracing Twitter for the creative challenge imposed by its 140-character limit, for its real-time functionality, and for its interactivity. Twitterature, or Twiction, or whatever else you’d like to call it, is not just a means of reaching today’s ADD-raddled reader–it’s a new medium entirely, spawning new ways to create and interact with fiction.
So without further ado, here’s a short guide to try innovative and interesting Twitter fiction projects, past and present:
 Electric Literature’s highly anticipated “microserialization” of Rick Moody’s novel begins today, and is definitely worth a read. Rather than chopping up a pre-written story into 140-character bursts as many other Twitter novelists tend to do, Moody wrote his novel Some Contemporary Characters expressly for Twitter and embraced the character limit as a source of creative inspiration. Each section of the novel comes every 10 minutes and lasts until December 2nd.
 Last Bloomsday, two Ulysses enthusiasts took the novel’s 10th chapter, Wandering Rocks, and retraced all the events of that day on Twitter. Videogame designers Ian Bogost and Ian McCarthy registered 54 of the novel’s characters as Twitter users, who all Tweeted about what they were doing on June 16, 1904 at the correct fictional times. (Old project, since June 16 is long past at this point, but still worth a read. Here’s hoping Bogost and McCarthy will revive the project in some way next Bloomsday.)
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 This is your brain on books.
Jane Austen’s Emma comes to the big screen…in Bollywood. I am very excited to see Emma and Mr. Knightley dance and sing. For reals.
O helo thar: a good old fashioned book burnin’ at a Baptist Church in North Carolina. Books to be burned include such “heretical works” as Rick Warren, Mother Theresa, and, uh, the Bible. Book burning: ur doin it rong.
Maurice Sendak says he does “not tolerate” the opinion that Where the Wild Things Are is too scary for children, and concerned parents should “go to hell.”
The question is asked, again: is Twitter ruining literacy? We say, again: nope.
Boys like zombies because they’re both “dumb, brutal, ugly, and mindlessly violent.” Girls like vampires because they’re a proxy for the gay men they secretly want to date. Okay.
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My roommate is obsessed with Neil Gaiman, author of American Gods, Stardust, and Coraline. He got really pissed when I confused Gaiman with yet another Neil, Neil Stephenson, author of Snowcrash (the favorite book of all my nerdy and punky friends in high school).
I apologized but didn’t take it to heart because I didn’t think Gaiman was all that big of a deal — not enough, at least, to warrant my roommate’s obsession.
I was wrong, apparently.
Sci-fi nerds on the internet are super excited this month because Gaiman partnered with the BBC to run an experiment in creative fiction — on Twitter. We’ve written about Twitter fiction before (here, here, and here), but this is different. Gaiman tweeted the first sentence of a story, and then readers and Twitter users make up continuations to the story by tweeting under the hashtag #bbcawdio. Read more »
 This week: writers say the darndest things, Americans buy the darndest books, and also some zombies. Read more »
Poetry is sort of a curious object for me. I enjoy reading poems. I love spoken word poetry, though I know it’s not for everyone. I love how poetry is about the joy of language, the purity of expression, etc. But I have an utter inability to write it. And often when I’m reading a poem I feel like I’m being confronted with some cryptogram that needs to be decoded, which is fun, sometimes, and then again sometimes not. It can begin to feel more like a math problem than a poem. And feeding my complex still: rarely do I feel so inspired to write fiction as when I am reading a poem.
Am I the only one that feels that way? That is: confused?
Anyway, in light of these thoughts, I thought I’d share some of my favorite poems. Read more »
 An excellent photo of Hemingway kicking a can, via kottke.org In 1920, Ernest Hemingway’s colleagues bet him that he couldn’t write a complete story in just six words. Being Hemingway and all, he found a way. His colleagues paid up. Hemingway considered the story his best work:
“For sale: baby shoes, never used.”
Ninety years later, the rise of the Internet along with countless creative writing classes have turned the spirit of Hemingway’s story into an entirely new genre. Microfiction now comes in a variety of flavors: 6-word stories, 25-word stories, 50-word stories, 100-word stories, 140-character stories (aha Twitter, we meet again!). Leo Tolstoy and Ayn Rand, proud sharers of the “world’s longest novel” title, would be appalled. Probably.
But short doesn’t necessarily mean “incomplete.” It’s fascinating to see how much writers can achieve with so few words. Character, conflict, resolution–it’s all there, and in less time than it takes you to turn the page. And so for your reading pleasure here are 49 more stories under 50 words, including some by Joss Whedon, John Updike, and Margaret Atwood, after the jump.
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I just started a graduate program in creative writing and there’s a lot of talk about The New Yorker. All my professors are either current or former editors of the magazine, or their very good friend is an editor, or they just manage to name drop someone from the publication during the first class.
I subscribe to the magazine, mostly because I feel like as a young writer, I’m supposed to read it. When I do read it, I happily stumble upon some gem by Gary Shteyngart or Ian Frazier. But honestly, most of the issues go unread.
Apparently every writer is trying to get in there, and if you’re in, you’re it.
Well the holy grail just lost a little bit of its shine. Read more »
I have a longstanding love affair with words. Truth be told, I can’t get enough of ‘em. I love long n’ languid complex sentences, extended metaphors, adverbs and adjectives and gerunds…oh my! I like to read a lot of words and I like to use a lot of words, and I live in constant fear that I am a member of a dying breed. I have long assumed that the pillars of eloquence have been crumbling down around us as “text speak” rapes the English language and inane Facebook status updates stunt the intellectual growth of the young. But I recently read an article by Clive Thompson in Wired Magazine that gives me new hope and urges me to see the evolution of language in a fresh light. Read more »
This week: dramatic interpretations of literary hatemail, Twitter film adaptations, fun facts about the reading habits in Guantanamo Bay, and more after the jump. Read more »
 On June 4, two of Inhae Lee’s teeth (or as she puts it, “teef”) jumped into a bathtub and scrubbed themselves clean with toothpaste. On August 4, they went for a dip in the pool. These are a few of the recent entries on My Milk Toof, a blog that details, through photo essays, the not-so-mundane adventures of the creator’s liberated baby teeth, lovingly named ickle and Lardee.
Each photo is a treat to behold, having been painstakingly assembled with a mix of both miniaturized props that complement the teeth’s small size as well as actual-sized objects. And though visually stunning, the narratives themselves are surprisingly straightforward. A recent post called “Sweet Treats” consisted of nearly 35 photos of the two “teef” eating ice cream, and a large majority of those photos were merely captioned with the words, “slurp slurp slurp.”
Faulkner, it ain’t.
But readers loved it. “Sweet Treats” has received over 200 comments and counting, and while there are no statistics available about the readership of the site itself, the 13,500+ fans on My Milk Toof’s Facebook page indicate this is more than just a casual project. Read more »
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