Executive Severance - Softcover

Blechman, Robert K

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0983274754 ISBN 13: 9780983274759

Publisher: Neopoiesis Press, LLC, 2011

Synopsis

Executive Severance, Book 1 of The Twitstery Twilogy, while a work of fiction, is delightfully full of references to Media Ecology, and especially to Marshall McLuhan. You don't have to be a media ecologist to love Executive Severance, or laugh at Blechman's extraordinary sense of humor, but if you are now or ever have been one, you will get a great deal of added enjoyment from your reading experience.

What makes the print edition of Executive Severance truly exceptional is the amazing illustrations that accompany the story, produced by the acclaimed cartoonist, David Arshawsky.
-Lance Strate, author of On the Binding Biases of Time and Other Essays on GeneralSemantics and Media Ecology

About this title

From the Author

"What could be more practical for a man caught between the Scyllaof a literary culture and the Charybdis of post-literate technology to makehimself a raft of ad copy?" -Marshall McLuhan

According toWikipedia, the Twitter network began in 2006 and as of this writing in 2010 isapproaching 200 million users worldwide. By 2009 I realized Twitter was ahappening thing and if I didn't jump on the bandwagon I'd be left behind withmy ocarina and tambourine. But how to proceed? I had dabbled in Facebook andMySpace, but this Twitter thing was different. Limited to 140 characters (orless), with no photos, videos or extended links, Twitter conveyed the brief,the inconsequential, the trivial. In other words, the Twitter medium was aperfect vehicle for my literary aspirations.

I conceived a literary experiment: Was it possible to maintain a narrativestructure and attract a reading public 140 characters at a time? After 15months and the more than 800 tweets that make up this Twitter novel, I can sayconfidently that the answer is "no."

I adopted the detective genre asthe driver for my story because the brevity enforced by the Twitter medium ofnecessity requires that much be left out of the narrative. In UnderstandingMedia, Marshall McLuhan said:

"Likewise, in reading thedetective story the reader participates as co-author simply because so much hasbeen left out of the narrative."

Twitter as a medium forces thereader to fill in many of the blanks, so the detective genre mirrors the biasesof the Twitter medium. Wouldmy hero solve the crime? Would he undergo physical and mental trials? Would heget the girl? Would he spawn a publishing franchise? I soon realized thatTwitter forced me to adopt the serial techniques of newspaper comic page storytelling. To succeed I needed to learn and adopt the narrative strategies of AlCapp (creator of L'il Abner) or Chester Gould (Creator of Dick Tracy) as wellas Raymond Chandler or Mickey Spillane. How did comic strip authors hold theirreaders' attention each day and tell a joke while moving the story forward? Howdid mystery writers plant clues to direct or misdirect their readers whileinexorably leading to the revelatory climax?

Like advertising, Ihad concerns about reach, frequency and repetition. I didn't have the advantageof artwork, so I had to duplicate the effect with words alone. I spent a lot oftime in the New York Public Library reading archives of newspaper daily comicstrips. Comic strip artists can't assume that their readers will see everyissue published, so story telling in the funny pages involved a lot ofrepetition. The last panel of the Friday strip was often the first panel ofMonday's entry so readers who missed last week would see it again this week.Since my Twitter history was readily available to my followers I decided that Iwouldn't do a lot of repeating.

So the Twitterenvironment forces storytelling considerations similar to advertising, and alsosimilar to daily comic strips. There has been some concern about the negativeinfluence of Twitter on spelling, grammar and punctuation. I suggest thatTwitter detractors consider the gold in the Twitter stream, not just the dross.

I created a new Twitter account"RKBs_Twitstery" as a container for my novel and coined a new termfor the Twitter mystery genre. Starting on May 6, 2009 I posted a new ExecutiveSeverance tweet twice a day every day for 15 months, never missing a deadline.The 140 character limit required intensive wordsmithing, creative editing, theomission of punctuation in some cases and a lot of counting. I cultivatedbrevity, concision and obsessive-compulsion. Fortunately, once I completed mywriting I was able to leave these habits behind. The cumulative result of myTwitter efforts is collected the Twitter Novel Executive Severance, justreleased by NeoPoiesis Press and available at Amazon.

About the Author

Robert K. Blechman graduated from the University of Chicagowith a BA in English Literature and earned an MBA in Finance and a Ph.D. inMedia Ecology (Media and Communications Studies) from New York University.His doctoral research concerned the impact of advertising on our culture.

In senior management positions, Dr. Blechman led technologysupport operations at Columbia University Medical Center, PricewaterhouseCoopersLLP, HarperCollins Publishers, Olympia & York Real Estate Management andCBS News.

Dr. Blechman recently taught Fordham University courses on "SocialMedia", "Digital Media & Cyber Culture and "Introduction toCommunication Theory." His article "The Savage Mind on MadisonAvenue: A Structural Analysis of Television Advertising" appeared in ETC.,a journal of General Semantics.

He posts his Media Ecological musings on his blog "A Model Media Ecologist" at

robertkblechman.blogspot.com

and on his Twitstery Twilogy companion blog "Whale Fire" at

executiveseverance.blogspot.com

Robert K. Blechman is available for select readings and lectures. He continues to tweet at @RKBs_Twitstery, discusses his Media Ecology musings at his blog, "A Model Media Ecologist" at robertkblechman.blogspot.com, and has just released sequels to Executive Severance, The Golden Parachute, and I Tweet, Therefore I Am.

About this edition

• Publisher: Neopoiesis Press, LLC
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0983274754
• ISBN 13: 9780983274759
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 148