Ratha's Island 07

Another example: From this early version (posts weren't in blocks):

"From a distance Ratha recognized the little female. She was one of the best of Thakur's cub students.

Her boldness and dedication reminded Ratha of herself, when she trained under Thakur. Boldness, however, wasn't the best idea right now.

"Leave the creature!" Ratha yowled. "Follow Ashon!" The cub, however, was too focused on the three-horn fawn.

Ratha knew that instinct had locked the youngster on her quarry.

Nothing would make the cub break away unless someone knocked her down. The really good Named herders had that one vulnerability."

To this:

"Block 14

#rathafic From a distance Ratha recognized the little female. She was one of the best of Thakur's cub students.

#rathafic Her boldness and dedication reminded Ratha of herself, when she had trained under Thakur.

#rathafic Boldness, however, wasn't the best idea right now. "Leave the creature!" Ratha yowled. "Follow Ashon!"

Block 15

#rathafic The cub, however, was too focused on the three-horn fawn. Ratha knew that instinct had locked the youngster on her quarry.

#rathafic Nothing would make the cub break away unless someone knocked her down. The really good Named herders had that one vulnerability."

These examples show how one can work within a 130 character limit to create an exciting, easy to read tale. Since Twitter allowed clickable links in posts, I decided to give readers some of the research background on the tale by adding links to webpages describing various prehistoric animals or other items in the story. Another hashtag, “#rathalink”, announced those. Noticing that Twittered fiction posts tended to get lost in the Twitstream, I decided to make them more prominent by 1. scheduling them at set times twice a day, 2. announcing the upcoming posts starting a half-hour before they appeared, 3 arranging the posts in blocks of 3-5 per set (later 6-10 per set at reader request), and appending one or more #rathalink posts. The number of posts were limited to a maximum of 10-12, and often less to avoid clogging the Twitter tubes. We also decided to create a story accumulation page, so that readers who came late could orient themselves and enjoy the story. This wasn't new – many other authors had done it.

Now all I had to do was make sure the posts appeared on schedule and were duly logged on the Ratha's Island story compilation page.  For a month!

But we did it, and I hope you enjoyed this peek into the workings of a writer's (and publisher's ) minds when challenged by the new medium of Twitter. 

"Tweet!  Yarrrrrr....."