Today, the quote from Peggy Nelson that ended Sunday’s entry is our headline and the springboard for a look at some new ways of telling fictional and true stories with new media/social media/transmedia:

• Reader Stephanie Pride turned me on to a “‘micro-community’ of 17th century voices” that have clustered around the Twitter account @samuelpepys, the diarist Samuel Pepys (pictured). As reported here, “He kept a diary. Of everything. And what a diary it was — Pepys was a compulsive chronicler. EVERY DAY, for decades, he wrote something about what happened to him that day — from a few sentences to a couple of pages.” For this Twitter project:

  … they have taken the online archive of Samuel Pepys diaries, parsed them for a daily segment that best represents the activities of Mr. Pepys for that day in history, and converted it to be posted as a “Twitter Tweet” … Oddly enough there has been a growing micro-community of 17th century “voices” on Twitter that play off of Pepys’ Diaries– characters mentioned often in the main diary series (such as Mr. Pepys’ wife) now have their own accounts as well, and they appear to interact with each other from time to time.”


• Over on Facebook, the profile Henio Żytomirski tells the life story of a little Jewish boy, born in 1933 in Lublin, whose name was Henio Żytomirski (pictured).
• I have not been able to discover the name behind the blog StoryCentral DIGITAL, but she (he?) is a PhD student working on “a transmedia [romantic-comedy] fiction which will be the first rom com/chick lit transmedia story to be published in book form as well as on a host of digital platforms.
• I’ve covered several Twitter stories and novels in this space. As described here by Martin Bryant, Meet Mr Keihl is a novel that launched Nov. 22, 2009, and will take two years to complete at a rate of seven tweets per day. “The story is a spy epic set in the year 2130 that recounts the exploits of a legendary agent,” Bryant reports. Candyfloss and Pickles is another Twitter novel that Bryant cites. Bryant also references another type of Twitter storytelling, the fake Twitter account. Behind @dinner_guest is “an artist exploring the use of Twitter to let fictional characters tell their stories in a new way,” Bryant writes. The eight characters of the social-media Love Story November in Manchester each have their own Twitter feeds and blogs, Bryant notes. The story spanned November 2009.
• Also billed as a social-media love story is Crushing It, “a romantic comedy for the Twitter age. It’s a week long ‘live’ semi-improvised story told by the characters themselves using social networking.” The story unfolded between Feb. 1 and Feb. 5. The user was to decide how it all ends.