Digitalist digs twitterisation

The digitalist is a blog by the digital team at Pan Macmillan and they were kind enough to mention my twitter experiment in a favourable way: "Reading it in my twitter feed each day is a fantastic experience."

I've also noticed a brief mention in the influential galleycat blog. I was very flattered to discover that my "link-filled look at Twitter writing can help guide us as we march into the microblogging future". Ha!

Less enthusiastic is Ian Hocking, who found my sentences "curiously ordinary". Ian makes some good points about the importance of context in storytelling. I suppose in my defence, what I would say is that I am not really expecting this to deliver the same level of satisfaction as reading a traditional narrative. You could say that receiving tweets about what people you've never met had for lunch, or from celebrities waiting for their next shoot to begin, is not as satisfying as a night out with your mates. As a means of communication, twittering is necessarily disrupted and disconnected. That's part of its charm - or its irritation, depending on your point of view.

I suppose the interesting question might be not how my tweets compare to the traditional way of publishing a novel, but how they compare to other tweets. I was contacted by one person who said that for them tweets have to be personal, and therefore their use as a narrative vehicle is not effective. But I have had others contact me telling me how much they are enjoying the tweets - and that they like them because they are different to most other tweets. One person at least has bought a copy, albeit of the Kindle edition! A sign of the times maybe.

Despite Ian's and others' misgivings, I am going to stick with the experiment. I'm not really sure what I'm doing or why, but now that I have begun it seems important to see it through to the end!

View the latest epitweet (or should that be tweetisode?) here.

Light Reading launch.

Last night I went to the launch party of Light Reading by Aliya Whiteley (check out the cool trailer on her website). I really enjoyed Aliya's sharp and quirky first novel, Three Things About Me. Aliya told me that, despite its title, Light Reading is even darker than Three Things. Should be a great read.

It was an unexpected joy to see Mike Barnard there, the man who came up with the idea of Macmillan New Writing (publishers of my first novel, Taking Comfort), and fairy godfather to all the Macmillan New Writers. Also good to catch up with Will and Sophie from MNW, as well as a number of MNW authors and their entourages: Matt Curran with Sarah and David, Len Tyler with Anne and (very briefly) Cate Sweeney. Not an MNW writer, but a writer who has been very supportive of MNW (he wrote an early review of Taking Comfort), Ian Hocking was also in attendance. I've corresponded with Ian by email and I look in on his excellent blog regularly, but never met him in the flesh before. To be honest, I didn't recognise him at first, because he doesn't have a beard on his blog, and he does everywhere else. Anyhow, it was good to finally meet. We talked about things Russian, as we are both researching books set in St Petersburg.

The party was held at Goldsboro Books, London's loveliest and best bookshop, run by London's friendliest booksellers David Headley and Daniel Gedeon.

I spotted copies of A Vengeful Longing waiting for me to sign, and there seemed to be copies of the limited edition hardback of A Gentle Axe still available. Signed, of course.