Live-Tweeting the Apocalypse

Author Comments

I've written flash fiction before, but "Live-Tweeting the Apocalypse" was the first time I've written anything in Twitter format. The main challenge I faced was the tension between realism and readability. For instance, Twitter publishes the most recent tweets at the top of the screen, so a realistic rendition of the story would begin with the final tweet and work backward; however, I felt that this was perhaps asking too much of readers. Similarly, one critiquer of my first draft complained that the text was "a little too well-typed and well-phrased" for Twitter, to which I responded: "this is just an extension of the literary convention that dialogue is a tidier version of what would actually be said." The idea for the story came to me while I was hiking in the moors somewhere north of Hebden Bridge. Normally I can offer some account of what inspired any particular idea, but in this case I can't. It just arrived without warning, out of nothing--rather like the end of the world itself, I suppose.