Varieties of Epistle

You know, things are a lot more interesting for us writers of epistolary novels, now.

When Stoker wrote Dracula, he used diary entries, letters and newspaper articles. Since then, the form has only developed. There were a spate of novels written in email in the mid-nineties, ditto for blog posts, and more recently, works entirely in sms’s.

But what’s really fun, I think, is Twitter. Because no other form has the immediacy and the sense that you’re listening to someone’s inner monologue. Diary entries are too considered – people polish them unconsciously. But few people stop to make sure a tweet is artfully phrased, or even correctly spelled.

So what I’m saying is, look forward to the variety of types of epistle widening in The Ducal Line starting from tomorrow. (And yes, for those of you who’ve been here all along, I still plan to include bug reports when the story gets to that point. Which should be shortly – the meeting I keep teasing is more or less the climax of this act. Although please don’t ask me how many acts there are, for I’ve no idea.)