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November 08, 2008
Twittering in the 'Verse
So let me start off by saying that if you haven't heard of Twitter, this is what it is. I've been following some folks there that have taken on the personas of characters in the too-soon-cancelled sci-fi series Firefly. Almost everyone from the cast was represented, save one male character and one female. Since I used to play the Firefly RGP before our GM moved away, I've been missing it a bit, so I signed up for a Twitter account as ship's doctor Simon Tam and started playing along.
It occured to me this evening that I stumbled into something really cool. Twitter is a whole new area of writing and social communication. I've been following famed D&D cartoonist and writer Phil Foglio on Twitter for a while, where he took a character from his great webcomic Girl Genius and is continuing their story there, 140 characters at a time. I've checked out a few other people who tried their hand at writing a novel and posted it a bit at a time on Twitter, but they always managed to fade out before completion. There was also a one-day event between a few authors on Twitter a little while ago where they made up a story as they went along, feeding off of each others ideas. But this is a different animal.
This time, there's nine different people, all contributing to the same story - okay, eight, since one of the twitterers seems to have gone awol. And unlike the previous one-day event I was talking about, I don't think these writers know each other - there's no contact info in the character accounts, and nobody's attempted to contact me to find out who I am. A missing character just showed up one day, and they were welcomed into the flow of the story.
The tricky part right now is trying to figure how to play things with this lack of communication - where might we be in the canon of the series, for example? What do "we" know about each other as we're making up our entries? Obviously, we're not as far as the end of the series, or the follow-up movie, since everyone is still here. But where exactly is here? Are we playing along just past where the series ended? Just before the movie? Does it even matter? We could easily take our story off the track of the series - would it matter? Should it matter? This is interesting stuff, and it's gonna be fun, I think.
I'm pretty sure this put the nail in my NaNoWriMo coffin for the year, whatever happens.
Posted by zaren at November 8, 2008 07:00 PM