Posted by Lisa Everitt
Boulder native, New York Times reporter and Rudy Park co-creator Matt Richtel has launched his latest creative project: a novel on Twitter.
Called Twiller, it’s a thriller delivered one 140-character slice at a time. Catch it at http://twitter.com/mrichtel. You might want to check the plot summary first before jumping into tweets like this:
Interogators of 10days past asked: how do U no bout China&The hookers? Says I: huh? BAM; Face-punched. again: huh? again: SMACK. blackness
and this:
any1 no how 2 stop internl bleedin? must avoid hosptls.
Richtel tweets from his PC because, he notes, “im just 2 old 2 create-n-write on a gadget smaller than a hamstr.”
Like everything else in the media world, we’re rethinking what a book is. Must it have cardboard covers and dead-tree pages? Are the books that Doyle reads on his beloved Kindle any less bookish because they’re delivered electronically?
The Denver Post’s Claire Martin conducted a text-message interview with Richtel that ran a few Sundays ago in the Post’s book section.
Q: is Twiller off cuff or plotted out? u no how it will end? or does it change?
A: cuff&plotted. I no 1 big twist-medical in natur, methinks original, but conspiracy still evolvin. current events r drivin plot&muse 2 & sometimes im just in passenger seat
Q: do u have 2 make yrself misspell wordz?
A: comes natrily
I remember that about Matt. I met him in 1990 when we both slaved at the doomed Peninsula Times Tribune in Palo Alto, Calif. I was the business editor; he was the East Palo Alto reporter, alternately filing stories from what was at the time the murder capital of the United States, and pulling shifts as a “petroleum transfer engineer” (read: gas station attendant) because none of us could live on what Tribune Co. paid us.
All those drive-by shootings must have sunk in, because Richtel also wrote a dead-tree thriller called Hooked. He also comes up with the words for the “Rudy Park” strip and files an occasional story for the Times, where he landed after taking my biz-ed job when I fled the PTT, then bouncing across the bay to the Oakland Tribune.
Even in his early days, Matt was always getting in trouble for filing too many stories. I remember eavesdropping on the editor-in-chief chewing Richtel out in his distinctive beer-fueled growl. “Nobody cares about East P.A.,” he said. Only poor black and Hispanic people lived there, and as far as he knew, none of them read newspapers or patronized any of our advertisers.
This was the same place that used to trim my weekly mutual fund listings for space, usually around the letter S, back in the days before you could look them up on the Net. That’s right, if you owned shares in Twentieth Century or T. Rowe Price, you were S.O.L. That’s the kind of high-quality operation it was.
The PTT folded and Tribune sold the valuable city block it sat on for condos. Normally I mourn the death of a daily paper, but in the case of the Times Tribune, I can make an exception.
In <140 chars, I raise my elitist Boulder latte 2 Richtel, CU prof Mike McDevitt, John Hendren@ABC and all the other PTT survivors.
1 response so far ↓
1 New Gadgets | NYT’s Richtel Doesn’t Phone It In for Twitter Novel // Oct 27, 2008 at 6:41 pm
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