My friend Maura mentioned selling some stories to this newish SF/F/H venue for fiction, called Thaumatrope, which publishes content Twitter-style. I don’t use Twitter myself — mainly because I can’t access it throughout the day, mobile-wise, at least not for now, and it feels like that would be the real point of Twitter.

(That may change if and when I get a smartphone, but for now, I’m overloaded enough when I sit down to my computer.)

“Stories” is one way of putting it what Thaumatrope publishes, anyway. Twitter posts can be, at most, 140 characters. If you think flash fiction is tough, try Twitterflash! Still, the challenge is interesting. The most successful stuff I’ve seen so far has been the stuff Jeremy Tolbert posts under the username #futureJer, detailing a future post-collapse vision of what I take to be the place he really lives in. (Which is to say I think it works because of the continuity buildup between his various installments in what is really a series.)

And now Jetse de Vries has just launched another Twitterzine, this one connected to his upcoming Shine anthology, and a call for submissions. He’s looking for poetry and prose poetry, though — near future, optimistic, engaged with real-world issues… aw, hell, go look at the Shine site (linked above) for more on how he defines optimistic. This is starting to make me wonder if I shouldn’t just start tracking these Twitter zines anyway, out of curiosity as much as anything.