Please forgive the context – it’s important, especially as this is, perhaps, a different entry to Twine or html-based interactivity.

This story is part of a larger body of work, designed to draft and publish a novel using social media. It is is the basis of my PhD research. I grew up in a council estate in west London, I never went to university, as I had to work. Later in life, I suffered from grief from losing my mum to cancer and rather than do something negative, I became immersed in flash fiction. The communities greatly helped me. I wanted too give something back. I created new online global communities, and a daily social media word prompt (which went on to help hundreds of writers to gain followers, to write daily, to create other works). After receiving a dozens of messages explaining how this had transformed lives, I got one from a Native American community leader that this project had given them the ability to write and hope, I wanted to study it more. Traditional Publishing feels closed, exclusive, and the opposite of everything good about digital story-telling. My aim is that my research can help others. I feel it already has. But I want it to go further. Writers don’t need expensive course, or agents, or publishers, or even a laptop. They don’t need to download Twine or learn to code. They can write a novel with something as simple as a phone. One tweet/post at a time. They won’t be alone. They can also fit it around their illnesses, their working or caring or family commitments. They can be anyone, from demographic, or any walk of life. Inclusivity is the driver for this. I want more novelists from every corner of society.

If you follow the link, the story can be followed in tweets as a thread below. I know this is very different to many of your entries, but I still feel it meets the criteria and is very much in the spirit of what you are aiming to promote. I incorporated elements of interactivity, but they were not the main driver. Polls were posted to decide what stories I should work on, the locations, the choices of tense, the choices of points-of-view – and in this story, I even managed to branch a social media story into three different outcomes that could be followed using a hashtag. The end result was that the path with the most views will make the final story. The idea is that this will not only make a unique contribution to in a fictional writing sense, but enable others to learn and potentially follow.

As I mentioned, this is just one story of many. In the end, there will be a social media novel available to everyone to read, and hopefully for others to follow. I am learning so much. Thank you for listening, I hope you find some value in the work, and the method I used.