Serial Killer
So Sid's got me wondering if it would be quite insane to write, or at least publish, my NaNoWriMo effort over Twitter. It does have something going for it: the NaNoWriMo spirit is to sort of just bull straight ahead and get something done, and not worry about going back to edit or what-not. So it's a pretty serial sort of writing, which would be a good fit for Twitter.
Also, I'm not natively prolix, and I bet most of my output naturally would fit the 140-character limit. I have 561 sentences and 34220 characters at the moment. So 61 characters per sentence, on average, and you could subtract probably 1.3 of those for intervening whitespace. Plus, I like short sentences and the sort of writing style that comes with that. And I think restrictions during art are usually very helpful.
But: 140 characters is pretty short; I note that one sentence in this post already fails. I'd bet there are a few sentences that go over in my existing work, which would have to be re-done, which is not thrilling. I suppose if I allow breaks at serious punctuation (semi-colons, colons) almost everything would work without edits. Plus there's the issue of tools; I do want to keep everything in a more traditional document, for word counts and spell-check and subsequent work, etc. And I don't want to double my work in plugging stuff into Twitter. I suppose I could write a tool that does this--but then I'm spending time writing code instead of prose.
Hm. I should decide if I want to do this soon; the more text I accumulate the more difficult it gets.
And what's the point? Dunno, explore a new medium of digital-age publication or some artistic/scholastic hooey like that. 'Cause I can, basically, and it might be interesting.
Also, I'm not natively prolix, and I bet most of my output naturally would fit the 140-character limit. I have 561 sentences and 34220 characters at the moment. So 61 characters per sentence, on average, and you could subtract probably 1.3 of those for intervening whitespace. Plus, I like short sentences and the sort of writing style that comes with that. And I think restrictions during art are usually very helpful.
But: 140 characters is pretty short; I note that one sentence in this post already fails. I'd bet there are a few sentences that go over in my existing work, which would have to be re-done, which is not thrilling. I suppose if I allow breaks at serious punctuation (semi-colons, colons) almost everything would work without edits. Plus there's the issue of tools; I do want to keep everything in a more traditional document, for word counts and spell-check and subsequent work, etc. And I don't want to double my work in plugging stuff into Twitter. I suppose I could write a tool that does this--but then I'm spending time writing code instead of prose.
Hm. I should decide if I want to do this soon; the more text I accumulate the more difficult it gets.
And what's the point? Dunno, explore a new medium of digital-age publication or some artistic/scholastic hooey like that. 'Cause I can, basically, and it might be interesting.