Re-Release of River Hill: A Ghost Story

There is method to my madness… (I promise).

Back in 2019, I released a story one tweet at a time (on Twitter, obviously), but now that Twitter has become X, things don’t work as they used to, and I’ve moved most of my posting to Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads. (The links take you to the start of the story on each platform.) Since I’m teaching a class in digital writing this semester, it seemed like a good time to test out these newer platforms for writing fiction, so I have been reposting “River Hill: A Ghost Story, Part I” on all three platforms, one post or one “toot” at a time. You can see my original post about it here with a link out to the story on X, which is mostly complete. The following links will take you to the start of the story on Bluesky, Mastodon, or Threads, take your pick or try all three.

I say there is method to my madness because I decided to stretch the posting out over four days, and to do that, I looked for the beats in my story so I could find good places to start and stop each day. The hope, of course, is to get a few people interested with individual posts and lead them to the main story. On Bluesky and Mastodon, I can do this by including some additional hashtags on individual posts or toots (on Mastodon). I’ve used #writingcommunity, #fiction or #fictionsky, and #shortstory so far, and may try #amwriting and other hashtags today. I may see what’s trending for writers and try to jump on board.

Threads will only allow one hashtag per post, so I am using #rvrhl for all posts, just so you can pull all the story posts together with that hashtag. I’m also replying to create a thread, so that brings the whole story together on all three platforms. If you click on any post to view it, the ones in the thread before it will be above and any posted later will be or show up below. I might not need the #rvrhl hashtag now that they all collect posts into a thread like this, but I am thinking of expanding the story later with some tangentially related content, and I might do that on these platforms. If I do, then the #rvrhl hashtag will tie those other stories in with the original Part 1.

What I can do in Threads is to add a location to certain posts, so I’m thinking of doing that today instead of using a hashtag to provide a point of entry for people to find the story. The goal is to let people discover the story in different ways and to start it at different points, then go back and read from the beginning to the end or at least as far as I’ve written when they find the story.

I’m interested in how social media can be used as a kind of serialization, and how it allows readers to encounter a text in different ways and at different times. How does our understaning of a text differ depending on how and when we find it? I am also interested in linking different forms of online writing using this story.

Part 2 is already written as a Google Map project, though I might add more locations to the map that would allow me to develop parts of the story. Or I might link back out to Bluesky, Mastodon, and/or Threads to continue the story that way. One link already takes you to a website with Part 3, where you can read the story by following different paths, and there are expandable sections of the story that could branch out from that site as well. Part 4 of the story was written as a game in PlayFic format. So far, it is still unpublished online, though I’ve shared it with my students in the past, and it is playable. I’m hoping to make it more public this semester, too, so watch for a way to discover your own ghost story as a text-based game.

So far, I’ve decided to limit my re-issue of “River Hill: A Ghost Story, Part 1” to the three most Twitter-like social media. This post is a way to bring my blog back into the story as a meta-story about the creation of the story. I’m also active on Sustack and have an account on Medium. Maybe I’ll decide to write some of the story on one of those platforms as well, to re-create it as a series of “Notes” on Substack or to write it in a more linear format as a series for my email newsletter. We’ll see.

It’s exciting to have two classes doing this kind of work, one at the undergraduate level and one at the graduate level. This gives me the impetus, and maybe some time, to develop parts of the story that I have been thinking about. I’m glad to take the time to migrate the story to these three platforms, which also gives me a way to test how they each work for this kind of writing.