Introducing My Story Tweets

On 1 January 2010, I began a new writing project via my Twitter account. Each day, I tweet one sentence, sometimes more depending on the length of the preceding sentence. Each sentence serves as the next line in an overall story.

My goal is to tweet once a day, every day for one year. In the end, I should end up with a complete story that is 40,000 - 50,000 words in length.

I've milled around this story for awhile. It is somewhat reminiscent of Kurt Vonnegut, in that there are sci-fi elements. Here's the basic storyline:

Feeling as though he were born fifty years too late, a desperate writer unwittingly travels back to the Beat Generation in an attempt to beat Jack Kerouac to the punch.

I have a four-part strategy to crafting and publishing this story:

• Phase 1 - Tweet one sentence (or more if space affords it) per day.
• Phase 2 - Compile and blog all my story-related tweets on my blog at the end of each month.
• Phase 3 - Create a WebRing exclusive to the chapters of this story.
• Phase 4 - Revise and then self-publish my tweets at the start of 2011.

My Challenge to You
I encourage each of you aspiring writers to follow suit and start tweeting out a story. If you've always wanted to write a novel, but never seem to find the time, Twitter is the answer. You merely need to type up to 140 characters a day, including spaces and punctuation.

Not a writer but want to read along? Follow me on Twitter @kylestich.

NaNoWriMo - I Did It!

I reached and exceeded my word count for NaNoWriMo! I hit the 51,612th word this afternoon, one day before the end of November.

I am now left with a thinly fictionalized memoir that is in deep need of multiple revisions, followed by excessive proofing.

Most of what I wrote is abysmal. I decided from the start that I must allow myself to let it flow. I even laid off my internal editor for the entire month of November. He's glad not to have to look at what I wrote. He took a sneak peak about mid-month and started screaming at me about relevancy and deeper meaning. That got him locked out for the duration of the month.

All in all, NaNoWriMo left me with the following lessons:

1. It's always best to write from the cuff if you hope to meet a predetermined word count goal by the time the deadline rolls around.
2. It's not so hard to write a memoir. I rarely got hung up on details and story ideas, as I was pulling from personal experience.
3. 50,000 words isn't actually that much. It's a little over 110 pages in MS Word.
4. To achieve a goal, it works best when you set a deadline.
   

Now I'm going to let this novel percolate for awhile. I am considering turning it into a series with much more fictionalization of the characters involved. But, that will come later.

For now, there's an erotic fiction writing contest that I have been inspired to participate in. The word count is only 3000-5000 words. Suddenly, that many words seems like it would be a cinch to write.

My May Challenge &mdash A Post A Day

I write a lot in a whole slough of venues, but I've ignored this blog almost completely. To get myself in the writing mindset, I have decided to set a writing goal for myself.

This entire month of May, I will write one blog post every morning before getting my day underway.

Posts might come in the form of satire, reviews, poem, flash fiction, rants or raves... whatever most immediately inspires me each morning.