Monthly Recaps

Humor me here. Let's pretend that some reasonable number (let's say, five) of the 259 people who are ostensibly following The Secret Life of Hamel on Twitter are REALLY following The Secret Life of Hamel on Twitter. But then one of them gets the flu and does not go on the computer for a week. And another forgets to pay his/her Internet bill for a month. And two get so captivated watching Dancing with the Stars that they forget about Hamel for a while.

Don't these people deserve an easier way to catch up than reading updates in reverse order?

I agree. That's why I have decided to provide monthly recaps. (Also: this helps me remember what has been said so far.) So, look for the first recap sometime after April 1. And monthly recaps thereafter. For the next twelve and a half years.

My first technical problem

I went to post my "epitweet" this morning -- and the Twitter red number was a positive 1. But when I hit update I got an error message telling me that my tweet was too long --

Twitter did say that it went ahead and sent the tweet to my "good friends" -- who are they?

(Well, aside from the special people of Malta, who are they . . . ?)

So, just in case, I did the whole routine again.

Same result.

Then I figured out that I had some invisible characters: extra spaces at the end of the line. So I fixed that problem.

I also did a quick edit to further reduce the character count --

Third post was fine but now I have annoyed readers with a triple posting of the same essential line . . .

(This is no country for old novelists . . . )

Oh, well -- perhaps they wil humor me. At this point, I have a theoretical 221 followers on Twitter -- and 121 members of my Facebook Group.

The goof goes on . . .

It has begun . . .

FYI TO SELF -- I "published" the first sentence of the novel via Twitter just after five this morning. Looks like I will be doing this every day for the rest of my life.

I have 184 Twitter followers -- which means potential readers. Random House is not yet worried.

I also have 87 members of a FB group I started named "I'm reading The Secret Life of Hamel on Twitter" -- many of these folks do not even have a Twitter account.

So it goes.

Writing problem

Since I only have 140 characters to work with for each post, I've decided to eliminate some waste and not use quotation marks when people are talking. I think any readers will still follow the dialogue okay.

And I am not going to use tweet abbreviations -- like ur and c u soon. Too distracting.

Any other rules?

I don't think so.

(I'm eager to get things underway.)

Now I have an audience -- yikes

The pressure starts Thursday.

I now have an audience of close to 150 on Twitter -- and I have about 35 FB friends who have joined my group called I'm reading The Secret Life of Hamel on Twitter.

Promo time is over -- storytelling starts.

Yes: I have written my first tweet. In fact, I have written several at this point.

The challenge is to make each one interesting enough so that people actually look for the next one.

Let's see what happens.

Building An Audience for a Goofy Idea

Okay, here are my thoughts on building an audience for my novel -- The Secret Life of Hamel -- on Twitter.

Between now and Feb 5 (when I publish the first epitweet in the novel), I plan on emailing the world and providing them with my twitter address -- @secretlifehamel -- and hoping a few check it out.

And I'm beginning to follow a lot of people on Twitter from @secretlifehamel because they might, in turn, follow it.

But, since this is also an experiment in social media and viral dynamics, I'm going to stop any mass building efforts as soon as I hit 100 followers. Then I will see whether or not the audience builds -- or languishes -- or just disappears.

If anyone has any other thoughts on this, let me know.

A Blog for a Novel Published Entirely on Twitter

I admit -- this is one of my sillier ideas.

Who writes and publishes a novel 140 characters at a time?

Actually, if you google "Twitter Novel", you'll find a few who've already done so or are doing it right now.

So this effort is not about being first. And it's not about trying to get into the Guinness Book with something like the "longest novel" ever published on Twitter.

No -- this is about the creative challenge of trying to be interesting and engaging and telling a story under a significant constraint. Plus, after years of preaching "compression" to copywriters in my ad agency, it's time to see if I can practice what I preach.

To see the novel one epitweet (I made up this word) at a time, you need to have a twitter account and follow @secretlifehamel. The opening of the novel will be published on February 5.

For people (will there be any?) who get behind and want to catch up, I will republish all epitweets on this blog, weekly. Most of the time this will be on a Wednesday.

I will also publish a synopsis of the novel -- a chapter at a time -- so that someone who does not want to read all the past tweets can get up to speed in a couple of minutes.

Okay -- let's see what happens.

PS I have only written the first scenes of this novel and will definitely be making it up as I go along . . . who knows where it will go?