This is the end. . .

. . . of this book, anyway. Looking back, I'm kind of surprised with myself. In the past year (to the day, actually -- I started the first novel a year ago today), I've written three full-length novels. On fucking Twitter.

I was shooting for 50,000 words for each novel -- the first came out at 59,000. The second came out around 72,000, and this one (though I haven't checked for sure) is around 56,000. That's 187,000 words, all told, in less than a year (I took some time off between the books). I'm pretty happy with that (and they've all gotten a bit longer in editing).

Some thoughts on this last one -- doing it all on a BlackBerry (Curve 8330 from Sprint, for the curious) was kind of rough. I lost a couple of nights here and there to service outages, which I wasn't happy about. Also, doing it in the format I did (with complete sentences in each tweet) was kind of limiting and frustrating. Of all of the novels, this one's going to change the most in editing. Still, I wrote an entire novel, beginning to end, on a fucking BlackBerry. How many people can say that?

What does the future hold? Well, first off, the Twitter Novel Project isn't done. Hell, it's just had its first birthday! Can't quit now! But I am planning to take about a month off before I put up any new stories, and I'm not sure what form those will take yet. What new challenges should I tackle? Suggestions welcome, of course.

Well, that's me signing off for the moment. Thanks so much to all of you who have been such a huge help throughout this and the other books, and to all of you out there who have read, commented, and made others aware of this project. I'm not bullshitting when I say I couldn't have done it without you.