News: Elizabeth Woodville, 15th century English Queen, on Twitter
Original article found here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/aug/06/queen-promotes-book-twitter
Plantagenet queen promotes book on Twitter
Philippa Gregory plans sequence of tweets in the voice of Elizabeth Woodville, the central character of her new novel
Alison Flood
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 6 August 2009 12.08 BST
The Other Boleyn Girl author Philippa Gregory is preparing for her Twitter debut next week, which will see her writing a series of tweets in the voice of Elizabeth Woodville, the Plantagenet queen around whom her new novel is based.
According to Gregory's publisher, Simon & Schuster, it is the first time a bestselling author has condensed their novel on Twitter, but this is the latest in a series of recent literary experiments on the micro-blogging service which have run the gamut from the comic to the literary.
Last month brought a book deal for a pair of American students who will digest the classics into a series of tweets, while this year's Bloomsday saw James Joyce fans tweeting a chapter of Ulysses in the voices of the novel's different characters. "Lank coils of seaweed hair around me, my heart, my soul. Salt green death. We. Agenbite of inwit. Inwit's agenbite. Misery! Misery!" tweeted @StephenDedalus on 16 June.
Writers have also been using the service to publish their own work. Last September author Matt Richtel wrote a real-time thriller on the site - a Twiller - while this spring the author RN Morris began a Twitter serialisation of his 2007 crime novel A Gentle Axe. March saw the Booker-winning novelist Ben Okri releasing a poem, line by line, on Twitter to mark publication of his new book Tales of Freedom.
Gregory said it had been a challenge to turn the 150,000-word The White Queen into tweets written from the perspective of Woodville, mother to the princes in the tower and wife to Edward IV. "Tweets are a discipline, rather like a haiku, and the shortness of the sentence gives each one a rhythm which is really interesting for prose," she said. "It was more like writing poetry than prose. And some of the tweets seem to me to be more arresting than the prose of the book."
@ElizWoodville - who already has more than 100 followers on Twitter - will start to tweet on 11 August, with almost 250 140-word tweets from Gregory lined up to be launched over the following week. Gregory said she particularly liked her first one: "If my mother were not a witch, and the descendant of the goddess Melusina, I think none of this could ever have happened to me. But it did."
"I like this so much," Gregory said. "It encapsulates for me the mood of the novel, its dreamlike quality, the character of the heroine and invites you to read more." Other sample tweets revealed by Simon & Schuster include "I am no fool. This King is famous for his lovers. I won't be one of them. My family fought against him in the wars. All I want are my rights" and "My name is Elizabeth, a mother of two boys. What am I doing, waiting on the roadside to catch the eye of the most handsome man in England?"
Gregory said she was planning to continue to tweet after the week-long experiment with Woodville's character comes to an end on 17 August. The White Queen is published on 18 August.
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I hate Twitter with a passion, but Philippa Gregory is one of my favorite authors (even though I bitched a bit about her previous book, The Other Queen, for it was definitely not a favorite) and a review of The White Queen is forthcoming! This should be a neat experiment to watch for you Twitter users.
Plantagenet queen promotes book on Twitter
Philippa Gregory plans sequence of tweets in the voice of Elizabeth Woodville, the central character of her new novel
Alison Flood
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 6 August 2009 12.08 BST
The Other Boleyn Girl author Philippa Gregory is preparing for her Twitter debut next week, which will see her writing a series of tweets in the voice of Elizabeth Woodville, the Plantagenet queen around whom her new novel is based.
According to Gregory's publisher, Simon & Schuster, it is the first time a bestselling author has condensed their novel on Twitter, but this is the latest in a series of recent literary experiments on the micro-blogging service which have run the gamut from the comic to the literary.
Last month brought a book deal for a pair of American students who will digest the classics into a series of tweets, while this year's Bloomsday saw James Joyce fans tweeting a chapter of Ulysses in the voices of the novel's different characters. "Lank coils of seaweed hair around me, my heart, my soul. Salt green death. We. Agenbite of inwit. Inwit's agenbite. Misery! Misery!" tweeted @StephenDedalus on 16 June.
Writers have also been using the service to publish their own work. Last September author Matt Richtel wrote a real-time thriller on the site - a Twiller - while this spring the author RN Morris began a Twitter serialisation of his 2007 crime novel A Gentle Axe. March saw the Booker-winning novelist Ben Okri releasing a poem, line by line, on Twitter to mark publication of his new book Tales of Freedom.
Gregory said it had been a challenge to turn the 150,000-word The White Queen into tweets written from the perspective of Woodville, mother to the princes in the tower and wife to Edward IV. "Tweets are a discipline, rather like a haiku, and the shortness of the sentence gives each one a rhythm which is really interesting for prose," she said. "It was more like writing poetry than prose. And some of the tweets seem to me to be more arresting than the prose of the book."
@ElizWoodville - who already has more than 100 followers on Twitter - will start to tweet on 11 August, with almost 250 140-word tweets from Gregory lined up to be launched over the following week. Gregory said she particularly liked her first one: "If my mother were not a witch, and the descendant of the goddess Melusina, I think none of this could ever have happened to me. But it did."
"I like this so much," Gregory said. "It encapsulates for me the mood of the novel, its dreamlike quality, the character of the heroine and invites you to read more." Other sample tweets revealed by Simon & Schuster include "I am no fool. This King is famous for his lovers. I won't be one of them. My family fought against him in the wars. All I want are my rights" and "My name is Elizabeth, a mother of two boys. What am I doing, waiting on the roadside to catch the eye of the most handsome man in England?"
Gregory said she was planning to continue to tweet after the week-long experiment with Woodville's character comes to an end on 17 August. The White Queen is published on 18 August.
--
I hate Twitter with a passion, but Philippa Gregory is one of my favorite authors (even though I bitched a bit about her previous book, The Other Queen, for it was definitely not a favorite) and a review of The White Queen is forthcoming! This should be a neat experiment to watch for you Twitter users.