Writing Wednesdays: Tweet This!

Yesterday I entered a contest on Kathleen Ortiz's blog. The winner gets a query critique from an agent, which is an awesome prize, right? But the contest ain't easy: Pitch your book in 140 characters or less, aka, in a single Tweet.

I for one am not a Twitter user. I rarely even update my Facebook status these days, so I highly doubt I'd have much to Tweet about. I do enjoy following a few agent and author Twitterers (I don't even know the damn terminology!) but that's about as far as my involvement goes. So I'm not really used to this whole "think in 140 characters" thing. If you've never Tweeted, let me tell you something: 140 characters is nothing. It's hard enough to limit a single thought to one or two sentences. But condensing an entire book into 140 characters is a true test of one's summarizing capabilities. Here's what I came up with:

Seventeen-year-old Friday Anderson discovers that the hipster musicians she's working for are actually immortals, and she's one of them.

That right there is 136 characters my friends (including spaces). I've noticed that many of the entrants in the contest did not stick to the parameters, and in my experience, people aren't always held to the rules in these sorts of things. This irks the living twit out of me. For example, I entered a writing competition once where the word limit was 300, and several of the winning entries were close to 400. Why have rules if people aren't going to be forced to stick to them, I ask you? What can I say, I'm a stickler for rules. And besides, I kind of enjoyed the challenge.

This picture is worth at least 140 characters.

So, my writing friends, you still have a few hours to enter the contest. And even if you're not at the querying stage, I'd love to hear your 140 character pitch in the comments!