I'm a writer

I've written most of my life. My rendition of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves won me an award in grade 2. I always carried a notebook in which I wrote "My Novel", which, to this day, remains unfinished. Somewhere along the way I lost confidence in my ability and stopped writing, at least on paper. I never stopped imagining my stories. They kept me occupied when I was bored, or unable to fall asleep.

I began writing seriously about ten years ago. I had just switched school boards and was given a Writers' Craft course to teach. In order to teach it, I had to do quite a bit of research into writing and the writing process so I could break it down and teach it, and then everything gelled. The words seemed to flow onto the page. I had found my voice. I was, once again, a writer.

To date I have completed 2 as of yet unpublished novels, the second of which I'm still trying to market. The first one, The Guardian, has sat on my hard drive collecting virtual dust for about 5 years now. I take it down every once in a while, read part of it, try to revise it, and get frustrated. The problem is that my style of writing has changed so much between writing it and Phase Shift, my second novel, and I don't have the patience to rip it apart, as if it were partially knit sweater with a dropped stitch, and re-do it.

A few weeks ago, some friends of mine were discussing Twitter and how they were using it for business purposes and that got me thinking. And then I had a revelation, a completely unique idea, something no one had thought of ever before: why don't I tweet my way through my first novel? It could be in first person, as that's the point of view of most tweets on Twitter.

And so I began. I tweeted for about a week and then I realized: I could never have the novel play out over the month of May. I had to work. and I couldn't tweet during work. I moved the virtual site back a month. But I couldn't tweet during the month of June either.

I started to do research into Twitter novels and found that others had the same original thought as did I. Others had attempted to write Twitter novels with little success. Someone was using the idea as an assignment in her writing class! That settled it. I decided to take it all down, re-think my strategy and re-post over July and August. That way the plot could unfold in real time (or close to it) and I could post any time of day or night and I could make it work.

And now the waiting begins.