Twitterfic 2013

[EntAllat]

Finally, I've got news of what's coming up with the Twitterfic! For those who've been following for so long (and tweeting recently that you miss us), thank you! We're flattered that you've remained with us through such a dry spell. Hopefully this was worth the wait.

First, a little background:

It's been four years since I started tweeting three ENT characters (@trip_tucker's first tweet was November 14, 2008) - with no notion of creating actual fan-fiction out it. By Spring of 2009 the Twitter experiment had grown to 20+ character accounts, a large, lively group of real people behind those Twitter accounts, a website, several other social media accounts, and a Google group for discussion. It was also a lot of time spent managing the group and working out a balance between enthusiasm for role-play/story-telling and not overwhelming an audience that was following mostly on their mobile phones with no way to filter the characters. (This was all before most Twitter apps, Twitter "lists" and all the nifty tools within those Twitter apps.)

By May of 2009 we'd sorted it all out. With three smaller groups that overlapped, each sharing some shorelines and helping each other out with planning and tweet timing, we started our very first (mostly) planned story, "Shore Leave". By the end of the same year the ENT Twitter group had told 12 stories and tweeted a version of a popular ENT fanfic author's (volley) existing fic to raise money for charity. Another 20 stories followed in 2010 and 13 in 2011.

We had so many more stories planned for 2012 but, four years after starting, real life caught up with the group. It was difficult to organize, plan, write and live-improv-tweet such elaborate stories as we had before. To make matters worse, Twitter's own API changes are starting to affect the Twitter clients from which we were able to tweet so many characters simultaneously.

But we've not given up! This has been such a fabulous creative endeavor and our followers have enjoyed it so much that we couldn't just let it languish. We've enjoyed it and wanted to adapt to changing circumstances. It also occurred to us that we'd gathered so much of our audience well after we'd tweeted some of the stories, and it seemed natural to experiment once again with the technology.

So…

We've decided to roll back the clock and take the "RT" thing on Twitter to a whole new level!
We are going to "re-tweet" our previous stories!

This time around, we're cleaning up plot holes, expanding out B-plots, and integrating the "Status Reports", "Letters Homes" and "Personal Logs" that we did sporadically on the website the first time around. This time we'll have better announcement of times when the stories will start and end. Some of them may get moved around a bit in the timeline so that we have a more reasonable schedule of tweets and at the end of each tweeted story there will be a prose version to read on exclusively on The Delphic Expanse. And this time, if we decide not to continue once the stories are retweeted, we've got an ending - a PROPER ending, not a TATV ending - in mind.

We're still going to be interacting with followers. There will still be the occasional new unplanned "story" as we improv in between the planned stories - though certainly not as often as before. We do plan on having a few more of the "interactive" stories like the one where followers helped the characters solve a mystery and rescue the characters. And there will also be a few new, previously untweeted stories from those we'd planned on doing - but never got around to - in 2012. And finally, if we can secure permission, we may also, once again, incorporate a "Twitter version" of a fellow fanfic author's story.

We'd planned to begin this effort in February with a sweet closing story to our previous round but - once again - life events got in the way. Instead, we'll be wrapping those ideas into the start of this "ReTweet" near the end of May, with the anniversary re-launch of "Shore Leave". There's a bit of prep-work required, and even a touch of programming needed to make this work, but we're keeping our fingers crossed that we'll be able to make this work.

So here's to Twitterfic 2013!

Planned stories:
"Shore Leave"
"The Signal"
"Danger"
"Dancing"
"Duet"
"Captured"
"Quo'NoS"
"Birthdate"
and "War"

[paulinem]

Can't wait, EntAllat!

[Aquarius]

I have been so out of the loop with school. I am so glad to hear you're RTing the original stories. I feel like I can get back into it and catch up while revisiting some old favorites.

[EntAllat]

So...

Yes, we're still doing this! We're running behind on starting it for two reasons: 1) a LOT of RL stuff for me and 2) Twitter's changing APIs have killed a couple of the tools we use to actually DO the Twitterfic easily.

The RL stuff is settling down and I'm looking at our options for migrating to a new Twitter client that would work for both our improv-style of tweeting and the re-telling of the stories. The ENT Twitter characters should be back and active by next week, and we should be able to start the re-telling by mid-July. The Twitter characters and the website will make an OOC announcement when we're ready to roll.