Some of my best friends are fictional …

In the year since The Fictional 100 was published, I have had the pleasure of chronicling the busy lives of these 100 fictional persons, drawn from world literature and legend, who seem to be making news wherever I turn. As I went to press, Sherlock Holmes appeared in a new movie, enlisting the talents of Robert Downey, Jr., Jude Law, and Guy Ritchie to dramatize his further adventures and boxing prowess in a steampunk universe.  In March 2010, Alice went back to Wonderland and tried on all different sizes of clothes, before putting on armor, defeating the Jabberwocky, and breaking the heart of the Mad Hatter. In January 2010, Holden Caulfield mourned the death of his creator, J. D. Salinger. A year later, Mark Twain may well be whirring in his grave as a controversial new edition of his greatest book changed the controversial speech his Huckleberry Finn had always uttered (though experience taught Huck to think about things differently). You don’t have to be “real” to make news, as my Google Alerts told me every day, filling my Inbox with the latest performances of Hamlet (the play) or Hamlet (the opera) by Ambroise Thomas, the latest reworking of Superman’s formative years, the latest Sherlock Holmes graphic novel, video game, or app, the latest variation on a character’s fictional possibilities.

I’ve been keeping up with my characters as well as I can, often with the help of knowledgeable folks I’ve met on other social media. I’ve admired their blogs, reacted to them, learned from them. While microblogging on Twitter has been a natural fit–probably the greatest discovery and delight of this year–the pull to have a convenient venue for my own macroblogging has become greater, at least in my own mind! Where else can I tell you in excruciating detail my reactions to the upcoming Gnomeo and Juliet film next month? Watch for this post, or take it as a warning, as you choose.

But my first post about a Fictional 100 character will be my upcoming entry about Oedipus, as part of the Classics Circuit’s Ancient Greeks tour later in January. See you then.

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