The new novel is a constantly firing engine of tweets. Yesterday CalArts' Black Clock announced a Rick Moody fiction event on on Black Clock's Channel (@BlackClockmag):

The first story written expressly for Twitter by a major literary author, Rick Moody's "Some Contemporary Characters" will be tweeted over the course of three days on Black Clock's Twitter channel, @BlackClockmag, beginning Monday, November 30th at 10 am through Wednesday December 2nd. Tweets will appear every ten minutes from 10am until 6:30pm. Utilizing social media, followers of the story will re-tweet it in real-time, a community event that breaks down the conventional barrier between reader and publisher.

Moody's story is broken into 153 bursts of 140 characters or less, each clearly labored over with a precision and lyricism that reveals the surprising literary potential of the tweet. "It really was like writing Haiku," says Moody, who went head-to-head with the character limitation of Twitter and used it as a source of inspiration. "Moody has taken something that could be seen as gimmicky - 'Twitter-fiction' - and created something transcendent," said Electric Literature's Editor, Scott Lindenbaum.

A new way of writing that requires a new way of reading. Not to be confused with thumb novels of Japan, which my 15-year-old cousin Abigail Burman informs me is "a thing."

Disclaimer/boast: Chicken Corner's own Jenny Burman has a short novel excerpt appearing in Black Clock's Issue 11.