Word is going around that MidWeek is pulling the plug on its Friday/Weekend edition, which was added in 2005. This is the most visible symptom that we’ve seen so far of the financial woes of Black Press, which owns both MidWeek and the Star-Bulletin. MidWeek has been considered to be the financially stronger of the two newspapers, but Black Press, like much of the newspaper industry, had significant losses during 2008 and recently had the ratings on its outstanding debt cut.

You’ve probably read about those Japanese cell phone novels. Now my old friend, Charles Smith, formerly of Hawaii, is slowly unveiling a Twitter novel, “Kama Sutra Cadillac“.

For those who aren’t familiar with it, Twitter is a system for sending out short messages of 140 characters or less (referred to as “Tweets”) to a select list of “followers”.

Yesterday, according to one of Smith’s Tweets:

This is episode 9 of the twitter novel “Kama Sutra Cadillac.” Yes, there will be sex. Yes,lots of it. Tastefully presented, of course.

Smith provided this overview via email in response to my inquiry yesterday.

Having read that text-messaged novels are simply huge in Japan, (selling 400,000+ print copies after their cell phone success) I did a bit of Googling and found a mere handful of twitter novels here in the U.S. I wrote “Kama Sutra Cadillac” last year and as my publisher turned it down (they only print 12 books a year) I reckoned its mix of social satire and sex (not erotica, just playful) might work well in the twitter format.

I have no idea how long each daily episode is in Japan but I’m trying three tweets to start and may try 4 tweets as the story progresses–about 100 words at most. I would estimate the 90,000 word novel will end up being around 10,000 words in the twitter version–perhaps 100 – 150 daily episodes, although I could be wrong about this.

My twitter novel currently has 16 followers–certainly not much but I am committed to doing 100 daily episodes regardless of the tiny audience. It’s a comic novel at heart and my hope is its daily episodes might enliven the dreary economic times a bit.

He adds: “I don’t expect to make a dime off this but it’s fun….”

If you’ve got a Twitter account, you can read along by following “chsm1th”. And if you don’t have a Twitter account, you should set one up now. They’re free.

Two police officers arrived at the house just minutes after we got home last night. They were just following up with us after last week’s burglary and the arrest of the suspect on Friday.

Both were very interested in the little Axis IP cam that caught the photo of one of the burglars in the house. They commented that everyone seemed to have a copy of the photo as a result of making it available online.

They did say that the second suspect has not been arrested, but we now have identified additional witnesses who saw the two walking together in the minutes before and after they entered our house. And we now have the name of the detective handling the case. So hopefully we can move the case along again.

And, finally, here’s just a bit of winter calm. This was Sunday’s sunrise in Kaaawa. We only see the actual sunrise on weekends during this time of the year because we are forced to walk earlier so that I can get to my job the Capitol at a reasonable hour.