"The F***ing Epic Twitter Quest of @MayorEmanuel" by Daniel Sinker

Profane, outrageous, hilarious, all words that can describe Daniel Sinker's book, a collection of the twitter postings he issued from his fake Rahm Emanuel account. Wired called it ""the first truly great piece of literature to be produced using this micromedium that's rapidly transforming communication in the digital age."

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

Daniel Sinker: It's interesting, because I think I was the last person to realize that I was actually even writing a book. I'd been at the @MayorEmanuel Twitter feed for months, and as the storylines became more fantastical and more involved, I began to see backchannel discussion in the @ reply stream about turning the feed into a book. People wanted to be able to sit down with the entire story, not just have it appear in bits and pieces in their feed, or have to scroll back reverse-chronologically. They wanted the narrative. From there it was just a matter of figuring out what a book would be like. With so much of the story unfolding in real-time, it was clear that a simple dump of the account onto print wasn't going to work. Arriving at the idea of extensive annotations was the key to understanding how the book would work.

DS: Hands-down, it was how much fun the annotations were to write. They follow the fictional narrative of the feed and fold in the non-fiction world that was influencing it and, as a result end up telling a nonfiction narrative of the actual mayoral campaign of Chicago, plus an extensive guide to the eccentricities of the city itself. A day when you get to sit down and write entries about the Jessie White Tumblers, Jim's Original Maxwell St. Polish Sausage, and analyze poll numbers for a political race is a pretty good day in my book.

DS: A writer is just one of the many things I am, so that's an easy question to answer. I'm a coder, I build things on the web (including the @MayorEmanuel website, quaxelrod.com); I'm a journalism advocate, I currently head up a project called the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership that does work in the open-source software and journalism space; I'm a father of a six-year-old. I'm a lot of different people and enjoy being each.

Comics are one of the few forms of great, serialized storytelling left. It's still such a great way to have a story unfold--piece by piece, month by month--it's nice to really immerse in it again.

DS: Immediately next for me is to work this incredible job that I have. But in terms of this book, it's about engaging in the very vocal and very excited fan base that has emerged around the characters in the @MayorEmanuel universe. Whether it's signing books or selling T-shirts (a portion of which goes to an amazing youth writing program in Chicago), it's been great to be able to meet the folks for whom these characters resonate.