Goodnight Tweetheart, all twittery goodness

I have mentioned how much I love my iPhone, right? The next closest obsession I have is Twitter. I like it. Facebook leaves me unmoved but I watch my Twitter feed anxiously on some days, waiting for someone to entertain me with short, witty tweets. Sometimes I even try to write them myself. And 140 characters is just about perfect for me. I also find myself thinking through the day of clever things I should totally tell the world. This is where I gaze fondly back to my iPhone, my window to the Twitterverse.

One of the very first things I did when I became a Twitterer was find writers (and celebrities, but writers sounds more enlightened) that I recognized. Teresa Medeiros and her comic sidekick Christina Dodd were some of the first people I met on Twitter. I use the term "met" loosely because I am only a lurker, always I lurk, listening without contributing. I did meet them both at the conference that I went to in Orlando. To Teresa Medeiros, I believe I said something like...gulp, sniff, clearing throat cough, heavy mouth breathing "Um, hi, I follow you on Twitter. And I'm a big fan of Buffy the Mouse Slayer." I am such a dork, and painfully, stupidly shy at times but I consider it progress that I can do that with people who have such amazing careers.

When I read about Teresa's newest book (what does "women's fiction" mean anyway?), Goodnight Tweetheart, I was intrigued. An epistolary novel relying on tweets between the hero and heroine? Combining romance and Twitter in book form? I'm in. And as soon as I picked up my colorNook, I tried downloading (rant forthcoming). I did manage and I read this book in two nights.

I love any book that makes me smile as I read. And this one did. I also cried. And sometimes I both smiled and cried. I think that's how you know it's good. Heroine is a writer with second book-itis, frozen because she's afraid she won't be able to match the success of the first. Hero is a mystery man, an English lit professor, who schools her in Twitter usage.

Remember the funny vampire story I wrote and posted? And the funny story where Emma matched Lizzie and Darcy at a party with the Kardashians and the New Orleans Saints? Teresa does that so much better than I do...the funny, the pop culture, the idea of meeting someone and having your life change in an instant.

Two quotes to show why I enjoyed it so much:

As she passed the artfully lighted windows of Saks, the ghostly white mannequins in their designer dresses looked down on her with equal apathy, as if to say, "We have nipples, but no need of them. We will never know your pain."

I laughed out loud at this. I think that says a lot about me. It's right in the middle of a tense, sad section but the haughty mannequins were funny.

And a week or two ago, I wrote a thing for the ministry I volunteer with called "Fourth Watch" and the first line is "I hate three a.m." It's such a terrible hour. I usually only see it when things are not going very well at all and the silence and the stillness...it is like there is only you, your disjointed thoughts and messy prayers, and the silence. I knew exactly what Mark meant in this quote.

MarkBaynard: It's 3:30 a.m. and it feels like even the angels are sleeping.

MarkBaynard: The veil between their world and ours gets really thin at this time of the morning.

Abby talks about losing her father and her security in this world. I identify. Abby says somedays you just need your mother. Her mother is here but not here anymore. I identify. Somedays I miss my mother desperately and would trade in what I have to be able to rest my head on her shoulder. There's a lot to this book. Someday, if I can just write a lot more and maybe pick up some spare talent lying around, I want to write exactly like this.