George R.R. Martin has joined Twitter, though he hasn’t yet gotten the hang of using it.
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George R.R. Martin, author of the A Song of Ice and Fire series that is the inspiration for the hit TV show Game of Thrones, has been slow to take up new technology. As Bonnie Burton writes for CNet, he admitted last month that he writes all his books on an old DOS computer that’s not connected to the internet.

But as of this week, the “technology-adverse” [sic, and ouch] author has signed up for Twitter using the handle @GRRMspeaking, and is ready to take social media by storm!

His Twitter feed (as of June 10) is presented in its entirety below:

I don’t tweet all that much, please check out my live journal page. 😉 #myfirstTweet

— George RR Martin (@GRRMspeaking) June 9, 2014

And that’s just kind of perfect, that Martin is so reluctant to take up a “new” social media platform that he only used it to single-handedly remind a significant readership that LiveJournal even exists. It was a surprising enough revelation to inspire Caitlin Dewey, of the Washington Post blog The Intersect, to write a post dedicated to explaining its apparently continuing existence (the blogging platform has relocated to Russia, where it’s the 12th-most visited site on the internet).

Twitter might not be the ideal platform for Martin, to whom brevity has not come easily. As James Hibberd wrote for Entertainment Weekly last week, there was a bit of a kerfuffle online when a rumor sprang up that A Song of Ice and Fire might run to eight books instead of the planned seven. Martin rebuffed the possibility (at least for now), saying, “My plan is to finish in seven. But my original plan was to finish in three. I write the stories and they grow.” I can just imagine the poor man trying for hours to trim a Tweet down to the maximum 140 characters.

Then again, maybe this will open up a whole new medium of storytelling to him. His legion of readers has been waiting for years for Martin to finish the sixth book in the series, and anxious that the HBO series will catch up to the events of the books (showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have the outline for how Martin plans to end the series, so it’s a distinct possibility). Perhaps on Twitter, he can just start giving rapid-fire updates on what’s happening in the world of Westeros: “Big battle with dragons, they burn everyone;” “Arya walks for a long time, kills somebody, walks some more;” “Sumptuous feast occurs;” “Hodor says ‘Hodor’ #Hodor;” and the like.

Burton’s article concludes, “Here’s hoping Martin’s new Twitter account doesn’t distract him too much from finishing his next book.” At least so far, it doesn’t look like that will be a problem.