Moby Dick, TwitterLit's history, and KidderLit's future

In my last post here I announced that I was going to be experimenting for a week with tweeting a "classic" TwitterLit first line every day in addition to the two regular @TwitrLit tweets, which are posted in the morning and evening. So four days ago, at 3:00 P.M. Eastern Time, I retweeted the first line I ever posted to TwitterLit, back on April 29th, 2007:

r/t "Call me Jonah." http://is.gd/dTWNp

The r/t means that it's a retweet, but I'm using lowercase letters as a means of suggesting that it's a retweet of my own already posted material rather than an RT of someone else's.

I chose the above first line as TwitterLit's first post for two reasons. For one thing, Kurt Vonnegut—probably one of the first authors I ever became really excited about—had died not long before TwitterLit launched. Second, "Call me Ishmael," the first line of Moby Dick, is surely one of the most famous first lines there is. I chose Vonnegut's twisted version of that first line to suggest that TwitterLit was going to be playful. It wouldn't just be a list of the first lines of books everybody's heard of. (That would be impossible, at any rate: with two first lines posted a day one runs out of easily recognizable lines pretty quickly. To date I've posted 2390 first lines on TwitterLit, with another 1047 posted on KidderLit, and 35 posted on ScatterLit, the newest site in the TwitterLit fold.)

After four days of retweeting classics, I'm pretty happy with the results. There hasn't been a mass defection of my Twitter followers, and people are clicking through as much as ever to identify the first lines being retweeted. My current plan is to continue with the retweeted lines at 3:00 P.M. every day. I've also decided to try the same thing with KidderLit, retweeting a classic line on @KidderLit every afternoon. The first classic KidderLit line will be posted on August 5th.

Note that these classic lines appear only on @TwitrLit and @KidderLit. They are not re-posted at TwitterLit.com and KidderLit.com, where all the first lines ever posted are available for your browsing pleasure.