The Challenge

The challenge in this project is to see if I can express the story in 140 character bites in real time. I must make Molly believable as a person. My readers should be caught up in the story of an archaeologist as she tries to piece together the site story (no matter how wild), and not in a science fiction novel.

This poses a number of frustrations for me, namely in the amount of detail I can include, which is not much if I am limited to only 5 tweets a day (as one web site suggested). Dialogue must also be omitted. What is left is essentially Molly's blog as her summer progresses. The reader should feel her struggle with residual feelings for Gabe, her aggravation at Clint's childish antics, her love for Palmer, and her fear as she channels the spirit of John Harcourt, the previous Guardian of the artifact she and her crew uncovers.

To make Molly seem more real, I created a generic Twitter ID for her in RKLOGYprof, and refer to all players by pseudonyms: "Hubby" for Palmer, her husband; "Glyphy" for Clinton Johns who studies petroglyphs; "XBF" for Gabriel Sykes, the ex-boyfriend; "TA" for Bethany, Molly's teaching assistant; and "DCMike" for Detective Constable Michael Crestwood. My rationale is that Molly is a professional. Though she feels she has this story to tell--a story that needs to be told, given the way the novel ends--in order to post honestly, her true identity cannot be found out. Her students, colleagues, even her husband, cannot know what she is doing, lest her credibility be affected.

Though I would be the first to admit that there are problems with the writing of The Guardian and it needs more work before it even approaches the calibre of writing in Phase Shift (my second novel), there are nevertheless parts of The Guardian of which I am proud and that need to be included to enhance the story and the plot. These bits include something in first-person from Clint's point of view, and the description of what digging means to Molly. Parts of the novel are integral to the plot and its development, such as the prologue, the journals, and the letters, so much so that I cannot cut them out and consequently have decided to include them as appendices on my web page.

The countdown has begun. Tweeting begins 8 Jun 10, less than a month from now!