#TwitterFiction Festival starts today

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.

A partnership between Penguin Random House, the Association of American Publishers and Twitter, the #TwitterFiction Festival is a way to highlight the incredibly creative ways Twitter users are exploring the possibilities of storytelling on Twitter — and already today we saw some very interesting work.

This morning, @McCallSmith, author of the “The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency” series, kicked it off with a 39-Tweet tale, titled “The Sociopaths’ Ball”. Here’s a snippet:

For this rest of the story, see this list.

Romance novelist @KatieFforde captured readers as she tweeted a story of a young British woman who goes on her 20th blind date. Here’s a snippet:

The whole tale is here.

Stay up to date on all the stories by following @TwFictionFest, which will be tweeting out who-to-follow in each time slot. You can also visit twitterfictionfestival.com to see the showcased authors’ live performance, plus a custom timeline powered by RebelMouse that shows events around the #TwitterFiction hashtag. #TwitterFiction will serve as an open stage for everyone to tell their stories to a global audience, share your stories there!

Finally, to get even closer to the #TwitterFiction Festival action, you can watch a real-time stream of the live event portion of the festival, tonight at 7 p.m. ET, at twitterfictionfestival.com.