The only thing cheaper than talking about something is tweeting about it, which is why there are 675 entries and counting into the Twitter account/art project Working On My Novel. The project was started in 2011 by multimedia artist Cory Arcangel, who previously created the similarly-themed Sorry I Haven’t Posted, and is based on the simple, snarky premise of automatically retweeting every time someone uses the phrase “working on my novel” on Twitter.
Now a collection of Arcangel’s tweets—or retweets, as the case may be —is being published by Penguin Books, which must be bittersweet for everyone involved who self-published their magnum opus on Kindle Direct but had tweets about it printed in an honest-to-goodness paper book. And that might be at least partially their fault, as the same cliched fixations on wine, cats, coffee in general, and Starbucks in particular come up over and over again in Working On My Novel. But not every aspiring novelist is (quite) so predictable. Here are some other things people like to do while working on their novels:
-Watch Family Guy, CSI: Miami, and Bridezillas
-Listen to Yanni and burn apple-cinnamon scented candles
-Think about making mayonnaise
-Read Proust
-Hang out at McDonald’s
-Drink Monster energy drinks
-Look up squirrels