Two-Fisted Tweets
by James Hutchings
Smashwords
Copyright © February 2011
You Set the Price!
Approximately 7 Pages
Ebook
Having reviewed self-published books for over three years now, I appreciate the bizarre and unique. I’m convinced we all have a book inside of us; some of us just have to be willing to break the conventional mold to write it. I have huge respect for anyone willing to use POD technology to do just that these days. And thank goodness for outlets like Smashwords.com that allow us to reach readers who might appreciate the same.
To think we once moaned about the formatting of page numbers and paragraph breaks in self-published books. True Ebooks don’t have page numbers! And while I still show concern for proper formatting, you have to applaud a book that steps outside those boundaries too and pulls it off successfully!
That’s exactly what James Hutchings has done with his book, Two-Fisted Tweets, available at Smashwords. While others out there have collected their personal Twitter tweets and formatted and published them, James has actually composed extremely short stories using the Twitter guideline of 142 characters or less, sometimes even dropping a period (.) at the end to meet the character count.
His book only contains 30 stories, so as you can imagine in PDF format it’s very short. 7 pages to be exact!
Forgot plot and POV and character traits. Hutchings has given us extreme flash fiction at its best, presenting the reader with the bare essence of a story that you will ponder long after you’ve read it. Here are a few of my favorites:
They withdrew his invitation to speak at the conference on stalking. But he knew they didn’t mean it.
“Mum, Dad,” said the nervous young vampire, “there’s something I have to tell you. I’m…sparkly.”
There are a few writers that I follow on Twitter who post thoughts full of irony or sarcasm or extremely short stories on a daily basis. They break up the monotony of everyone else tweeting news clips or what line they are standing in every day, and most of all they make me smile. They make me remember the punchlines to share with someone in conversation later. Who cares what the joke was, right?
So in keeping with Twitter rules (with 8 characters to spare), I’ll just say this… Hutchings may not have a lot to say in his book Two-Fisted Tweets, but his 142 character stories speak volumes. I highly recommend!
Thanks for this review.
[...] read and reviewed James Hutchings’s Two Fisted Tweets I have to say that Mr. Hutchings is a master at microfiction. Able to tell a story in 172 [...]