The Pencil Twitter

Quite a while ago, my good friend Jason start­ed a Twit­ter feed about his cat, Sock­ing­ton. The feed has not only become extreme­ly pop­u­lar, with over 4,000 fol­low­ers, it’s also become famous to the point of being fea­tured on a New York Times blog.

To keep up the illu­sion that the cat was mak­ing con­stant Twit­ter updates, Jason even wrote a script that uploads entries at ran­dom times. Need­less to say, this is pre­cise­ly the kind of time-wast­ing activ­i­ty that I thrive on when I’m not—you know—writ­ing. I want­ed in.

I mulled it over for a cou­ple of weeks. If I did this, what kind of feed would I have? I cer­tain­ly did­n’t want to update the world every five min­utes about my own pro­cras­ti­nat­ing sh‑t , nor did I want to write about anoth­er f‑cking cat.

I love Sweet­ie (my cat), but hon­est­ly, she’s a bitchy lit­tle bore. Like a few ex-girl­friends of mine.

I want­ed a chal­lenge. A POV char­ac­ter you would­n’t nor­mal­ly con­sid­er. A POV char­ac­ter the read­er would be loath to get emo­tion­al­ly invest­ed in.

Like a pen­cil. Maybe my and John Stein­beck­’s pre­ferred pen­cil.

A Mira­do Black War­rior pen­cil.

And like Sock­ing­ton, Mira­do is slick­ly mak­ing his updates using Jason’s script. I pre-wrote a mon­th’s worth of Tweets so the pen­cil can post updates 2x a day at ran­dom times.

Hope you enjoy. And tell your friends. I want a mil­lion fol­low­ers.