Previewing a week of #TwitterFiction and all that encompasses.

It’s day one of the #TwitterFiction Festival, and we’ve already seen a myriad of stories coming to life in 140 character bursts. Throughout the rest of this week through Sunday, March 16, the festival will showcase the creative work of more than 50 authors from around the world.

Twitter and the world of fiction will come together March 12-16 for the second #TwitterFiction Festival, a digital storytelling event sponsored by the Association of American Publishers, Penguin Random House, and Twitter. Today, as we gear up for the festival, we’re announcing the lineup of selected authors who will present their eclectic mix of fictional stories to the world on Twitter, all in real time.

Though Twitter is famous for its utility in telling real-life, real-time stories, it’s also an enormously powerful tool for another kind of storytelling: fiction.

After reviewing a wide array of entries from 20+ countries, the Twitter Fiction Festival selection panel has chosen a diverse array of storytelling projects to showcase during the Festival. The external panel was composed of experts from around the publishing industry in the US, but the showcase they’ve selected includes published and novice authors from all over the globe. These special Twitter experiments will be highlighted on a dedicated showcase page during the Festival, starting Wednesday.

With the submission deadline for our Twitter Fiction Festival coming up on Thursday, now’s a good time to introduce you to the people who will help us decide what to showcase. They come from all across the writing world, and we’re thrilled to have their input.

Twitter is a place to tell stories. Often those stories are about news, or politics, or perhaps sports or music, but it turns out Twitter is a great place for telling fictional stories, too. As one professor from Michigan State University says, “Tweeting can be thought of as a new literary practice.” We want to celebrate that.

In the little bit of spare time I have outside of Twitter I like to write fiction. That’s why when I came to Twitter I volunteered to help work with authors and publishers about how best to use Twitter.

If you post to Twitter, you’re a writer in your own right. While you may not be writing novels, you’re telling your own stories 140 characters at a time. This week on #OnlyOnTwitter we have a number of posts about writers and writing. From authorial Twitter takeovers to crowdsourcing speechwriting to a Twitter staging of a play— it’s everything from 140 characters to 140,000 words in this week’s edition of #OnlyOnTwitter.

Like a good book, Twitter can take you anywhere. And now it’s even easier to discover literature and follow your favorite authors, critics, magazines and publishers by downloading the official Twitter app on the Barnes & Noble NOOK Color and NOOK Tablet, and the Amazon Kindle Fire.