My Fictional Life / Twuffer

A few posts ago I wrote that I was going to create a piece of fiction using my Twitter account and my Facebook page. I mentioned at the time that I knew where the story was going, though I wasn't exactly sure how I was going to get there. The gist of the story was that the main character in the story (that would be "me") was going to be revealed as an overstressed, overworked, middle-aged man who wasn't taking care of himself (as demonstrated by the on and off caffeine usage which was going to escalate into something else--I wasn't sure what) and who was in a "bad" period with his wife and family. Over the course of the story the man was going to beat his dog, cheat on his wife, completely give up his faith in God, but by the end of the story be redeemed/reconciled in all of these areas. Or (and I'm not kidding here) he was going to develop powers and become a superhero. I hadn't really made up my mind, as the beginning of the story was going to be the same either way.

I knew that there was some potential for misunderstanding, since the story was going to use MY Facebook and Twitter pages and I was going to refer to my wife as Lisa and my children by their names and everything else was going to be fairly similar as well, but I didn't really care whether or not anyone got angry or confused by it. In fact, I was pretty much going to do this as long as I got one person's go ahead: my wife's.

And in the end, she wasn't too keen on the idea of me lying to a bunch of people. In fact, I believe the words she said were "If you want to BE a friend, you have to ACT like one, and friends don't lie to their friends." She also said she was (understandably) uncomfortable with me creating a parallel me that did so many bad things. And I can see why she'd feel this way. If I were in her shoes, I wouldn't like it, either. And to be honest, I felt a little sheepish about people taking me seriously, even though I tried to warn everyone who was getting upset.

So I stopped the story. I had actually created all of my 5 a day posts through the middle of June, but I got rid of all of them.

But don't feel that I wasted my time, though, because in the process of creating this story I found a really cool website: Twuffer. Twuffer allows you to make your Twitter posts in advance and schedule them to be posted. That's how I was able to write the story through the middle of June when Facebook and Twitter don't allow you to schedule posts. It's a pretty cool tool for anyone who needs to do this, and for me that includes not just writing a novel. I use Twitter to post "breaking" announcements to my district's web site front page, and now I don't have to remember to make a post on some future date. I can go ahead and schedule the post now and let Twuffer post it for me later. So the whole experience was worth it to me for that alone.