Well, Penguin (the publisher, rather than the animal) have started an interesting little project, they have launched a Wiki (Internet 2.0-style collaborative workspace that anyone can edit) where the idea is a community will magically form, self organise, and write a novel...Well (before you scoff) it worked for Wikipedia (despite all odds)! ;)
They started it off yesterday (or thereabouts) by seeding the front page (chapter 1) with a short piece about a chap with slight mental issues taking his small dog (Inu) for a walk...when I came back and had a look today it's grown to seven chapters long and starts out with a guy called "Big Tony" ordering pepperoni pizza (written by someone who doesn't know you follow a full stop with a capital letter)...!
If it carries on like this we'll get a novel all right, but one with terrible punctuation (careful Fink, people in glass houses!), rather a lot of unrelated threads, following hundreds of characters sometimes connected to one another but only by painfully tenuous links...we shall see though, it's an interesting experiment, so I'll keep half an eye on it... ;)
I'll just pop in and correct that spelling mistake I spotted on the third line down... ;)
Update - My God, it actually seems to be working! Those early fumbling entries have been refined by the masses, woven into something wonderful...this story feels like an organic entity, constantly reinventing itself into ever more beautiful versions...the charming thing is that the rough outlines haven't just been deleted, the essence has stayed, like an Tolkien Elf walking into a normal woodland, holding up the ring of power and starting to forge something extraordinary...this is a privilege to witness...
2 comments:
Looks like what you said is coming true - too many threads
It's all gone downhill again after the weekend...we'll have to see where they put a stop to matters! ;)
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