By Greg Pak
UPDATE: Click here to read Chapter One!
Over the years, I’ve had a number of story ideas that I thought would work best as novels. But given my other comics and film deadlines, I’ve never been able to organize my schedule or section out the brainspace to do something as huge as write a book.
But the other day it occurred to me that I might be able to kick myself in the pants and crank out a first draft of one of these stories by writing it publicly — on Twitter.
I started last night. You can follow the madness at twitter.com/GregsNovel (the username will probably change once I figure out what the actual title of the book is).
My ground rules for myself:
1. I have a story in mind with a beginning, middle, and end. But I pledge that all of the actual writing of the story will be done only in Twitter, 140 characters at a time. No cheating by drafting stuff ahead of time and cutting and pasting it in. What you see is a genuine, unvarnished first draft, written in real time right before your eyes.
2. Any non-novel-writing on the account will be preceded by an asterisk.
3. I’ll post compiled chapters right here on my website, along with notes-to-self about what’s working and what isn’t and what I’ll try to correct when I hit the second draft. But I’m going to do my best to keep moving forward and hammer out the whole story before going back to revise. Revisions will probably happen off of Twitter.
So that’s the big plan for this crazy experiment! Again, check out twitter.com/GregsNovel and let me know what you think!