Closing out the readers at last week’s Vol. 1 at Matchless was John Wray, whose piece (an excerpt from a novel in progress) left me with the inclination to track down everything he’s written. (Two novels, as it turns out, with a third forthcoming.) On Twitter , Wray is currently posting brief vignettes comprising a larger narrative about a character cut from his third novel. Via Matt Fraction comes the news that pulp novelist Charlie Huston is also posting a larger work incrementally on Twitter.
Both Wray’s and Huston’s stories-in-progress are definitely worth a read, and there’s something deeply interesting about Twitter as, essentially, the logical endpoint of the serialized narrative; the point at which every sentence (or cluster of sentences) needs to be memorable enough to keep the reader interested. Twitter as a specific medium is a concept that’s been in my head a lot lately, for reasons that may be more clear in a few hours…