The Orange Salamander describes a small-town mystery, but ‘small-town mystery’ is as conventional as the story’s description gets. If you mixed a hard-boiled crime story with a cyberpunk novel, and asked a non-writer to write it, The Orange Salamander is what you might get.
The story is a twiller, a thriller told in small bits, through posts on Twitter.com. Posts on Twitter may be no more than 140 characters, and a single post is called a tweet. I certainly did not invent this constrained form; it has both American and Japanese inspirations.
I thought that I’d play around with the format, though. Play, not experiment: I take none of this seriously, and have no pretensions to literature: it’s all fun, and silly, and nothing more. It’s meant to be ridiculous and a parody, confined within a small space.
At least one person will wonder what all of this means. Since I’ve been posting at this website, two things have surprised me: the number of times that people erroneously speculate on the meaning of something I’ve posted, and the risible excuses that municipal officials often make for their actions and policies. (I see more clearly now how people get caught up with fortune tellers after considering the stodgy minority’s depth of reasoning.)
Any resemblance to actual persons or serious matters, in Whitewater, Wisconsin or environs is unintentional and coincidental. If you see yourself in any of these characters you are mistaken; if you’re convinced of it, you’re mistaken and deluded.
I will collect and post each day’s, and week’s, twiller tweets on this website. Tweets will also appear, individually, on the right sidebar of the website.