Tweet Books

Bell has been making creative use of the Twitter platform, which allows members to send status messages limited to 140 characters in length. She recently posted a prequel to her newest book, Ratha’s Courage, and her feline characters make humorous comments on everything from last year’s Presidential election to human Valentine’s Day mating rituals.

Bell’s experiments with Twitter encouraged her to write a short story specifically for posting on the service. Although she isn’t the first to experiment with Twitter fiction, it’s still mostly unexplored territory, and Bell had to figure out how to create a story that would work within the very short messages allowed by Twitter. She considered telling the story entirely in dialog, with each character having its own Twitter username, but finally decided a straightforward narrative would be easier to follow in such short segments. …