Text message novel

blacbird · Jan 24, 2007

A novel consisting entirely of Internet-style text-messages has just been published in Finland:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16790277/

Here, from the above story, is the best part about it:

"The texts are rife with grammatical errors and abbreviations commonly used in regular SMS traffic."

I can hardly wait to get my talons on it. How about you?

caw

Shadow_Ferret · Jan 24, 2007

It's the end of the world as we know it.

Jamesaritchie · Jan 24, 2007

Text

Sound like a must read for all those people out there who never read novels.

Bravo · Jan 24, 2007

dammit.

this so shouldve been my idea.

PattiTheWicked · Jan 24, 2007

Movie alert: "Titanic" as AIM Convo

MidnightMuse · Jan 24, 2007

So was he paid in phone minutes?

Del · Jan 24, 2007

It sounds creative. It just doesn't sound interesting.

TwentyFour · Jan 24, 2007

OMG I DID THIS ONCE FOR FUN!

I had some people on yahoo who decided I was a horrible person (yeah, on yahoo! LOL! in chat and I was supposed to care?). So anyway, me and some internet pals made clones of all the people in the chat room that we disliked and we came in saying we were hemaphrodites and so on...

Anyway, because we had our own names and such, we were not banned from yahoo...we got tons of their weird little yahoo secrets and put them in a fictional book on LULU.com. Several people actually bought it! I couldn't believe it!

I deleted it right afterward but it was titled "Dramatic Chatroom Drama's" and had a bloody rose and knife on the cover. It used to be here: http://www.lulu.com/content/336006 Had I known others might want to see it, I would have kept it.

stormie · Jan 24, 2007

i c i missd it. thank u 4 the info.

IrishScribbler · Jan 24, 2007

It interests me in the area of contemporary writing, inspiring discussion on what constitutes literature, etc.

I imagine artists had much the same reaction the first time an artist bent a metal beam into an arc and called it art.

MajorDrums · Jan 24, 2007

What a gimmick.

TwentyFour · Jan 24, 2007

ooops...I forgot to say my book was made up convo's we had and it referenced the chat names of others in the chat room. One guy repeatedly said "Damn Ohio weather!" So we made a character who said that and imitated him repeatedly (he loved it though). Holly a woman who claimed to be a model in Canada was our psycho hemaphrodite.

scribbler1382 · Jan 24, 2007

A better analog would be the first time an artist took a metal beam and told people to imagine it bent into an arc and called it art. (lazy bastards)

IrishScribbler · Jan 24, 2007

scribbler1382 said:
A better analog would be the first time an artist took a metal beam and told people to imagine it bent into an arc and called it art. (lazy bastards)

LOL

Then can I give a publisher two hundred-fifty sheets of paper and tell them to imagine it's the next great American novel?

moth · Jan 24, 2007

TTFN and TTYL by Lauren Myracle are YA titles with the same format.

IrishScribbler · Jan 24, 2007

moth said:
TTFN and TTYL by Lauren Myracle are YA titles with the same format.

YA is different, though, IMO.

On a slightly related note, this idea reminds me of Up the Down Staircase by Bel Kaufman.

Shadow_Ferret · Jan 24, 2007

I had always thought that writing a book entirely in dialect and slang was to be avoided. I'm certainly not going to struggle through a book filled with abbreviations I don't understand.

But then I'm not the target audience. Whatever the target audience is.

PeeDee · Jan 24, 2007

2morrow iz anudder dai!!!11

i dun giva dam grrrrl!

...

*sigh*

So really, what you're saying is, there is no feasible reason why Carrie and I couldn't publish our Variety Hours are serious pieces of literature? I mean, why not? We're a leg up already, we used sentences.

arrowqueen · Jan 24, 2007

I cringe when I read actual text messages written in abbreviations. Reading this would reduce me to foaming at the mouth and biting people.

scribbler1382 · Jan 24, 2007

PeeDee said:
So really, what you're saying is, there is no feasible reason why Carrie and I couldn't publish our Variety Hours are serious pieces of literature? I mean, why not? We're a leg up already, we used sentences.

Do a global search and replace to dump all the vowels and call it Slavik text messaging.

Haggis · Jan 24, 2007

PeeDee said:
2morrow iz anudder dai!!!11

i dun giva dam grrrrl!

...

*sigh*

So really, what you're saying is, there is no feasible reason why Carrie and I couldn't publish our Variety Hours are serious pieces of literature? I mean, why not? We're a leg up already, we used sentences.

Those were sentences?

PeeDee · Jan 24, 2007

They must be, I assumed that was why you hadn't read it yet.

Has this Finish novel actually SOLD any copies yet? Does anyone know?

icerose · Jan 24, 2007

Sounds painful.

Jamesaritchie · Jan 24, 2007

beams

IrishScribbler said:
It interests me in the area of contemporary writing, inspiring discussion on what constitutes literature, etc.

I imagine artists had much the same reaction the first time an artist bent a metal beam into an arc and called it art.

A good analogy. Bent metal beams are crap, too.

PeeDee · Jan 24, 2007

I can tell if something's modern art by if I go "What the Badword is this?" while looking at it.

I went to the Minneapolis Art Institute with my in-laws, who stood around and said wise things about modern art, but could not, if pressed, tell me what it WAS or why they liked it.

A text message novel. Pffft. I'll stick with using all the letters in the word, thanks. It irks me when people abbreviate even in conversation with me.

(text conversation, obviously. No one has ever SAID "b slash c" to me in real life.)

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