Matt’s Comments (group member since Jul 07, 2010)

Matt’s comments from the Q&A with Matt Stewart group.

Really? Laptop open? You have much better balance than me.

Kinda ironic, isn't it? But between the day job and writing, something's gotta go...!

Way easier, huh!

Nope - the sentences didn't necessarily come out clean. As cool as Twitter can be, I wasn't going to limit my authorial weapons for its service.

That's one of the many reasons why I've never recommended reading the whole thing on Twitter. I did offer a more contiguous experience at the time by offering the book for download on Scribd, and now hardcopy's your best bet.

Twitter's a great way to get your attention, but not necessarily to keep it...!

Stacy I wrote The French Revolution furiously for YEARS - this book took five years from start to publishing in hardcopy (today). It's my first novel - there was a whole lot to fix.

When I had the idea to tweet it out last year, I happened to have lunch with a buddy of mine who works at Pandora.com. He built a niftly little tool that automatically breaks up text into 140-character tweets and shoots them out for me.

When I started up the experiment last Bastille Day, I tweeted out about a page and a half a day during US waking hours. I also toyed with the frequency of tweets - enough to get a bunch out without falling into spam - which worked out to every 15 minutes. After I got the book deal, I just dumped the rest of the book in and tweeted around the clock. It still took until late October to finish.

So: The French Revolution wasn't written for Twitter - it was written to be an awesome book. I wouldn't recommend reading The French Revolution or any book in long doses on Twitter. But Twitter can be a useful way to quickly sample a book, and see if you like an author's style of writing.

My favorite book ever is The Shipping News - egad, Annie Proulx has a magical way with words. Her writing's so good that ridiculous plot turns don't detract from the story - they make it more magical. Read her at all costs.

Also in the mix is Shame by Salman Rushdie - I think the compactness of this book keeps Rushdie's immense powers pleasurably focused. And, like The French Revolution, this is really an allegory about Pakistan.

My favorite book of 2009 was The Yiddish Policemen's Union - a pageturning crime caper in an impressively visualized world of Jews settled in Alaska.

What do all these books have in common? A rollicking imagination and dazzling language - ambitious, power-packed writing is what really gets me going.

OK, this is it. The novel - The French Revolution

For one, I claim that The French Revolution is loosely structure on the historical French Revolution.

Did you get that?

Why/why not?

What plotlines are you certain that they parallel this historical French Revolution?

Where do you have questions?

Wanna know how I came up with the novel - while managing a demanding day job?

The biggest key I can offer is to not go out during the week. Skip events, skip parties. They're usually not worth it, and I find that getting in that daily routine of writing for several hours is essential to actually completing pages.

Hey all - Matt Stewart, author of The French Revolution here. Thanks for dropping by, and for keeping the conversation not just civil, but interesting!

I'm open to all reasonable questions/thoughts/pokes, so let's get this party started.

First off, I'd love to know how you found out about The French Revolution (the novel, not the war)...so, how DID you find out about The French Revolution?