So You Say You Want to Write a Novel...

But you're too damn lazy to actually sit for hours on end writing (or typing, as the case may often be nowadays) 80,000 words.

No problem. Those birds at Penguin have come up with a novel idea (hah!) of a wiki-based novel. The idea is for people (that's you or me or anybody, folks) to go to The Million Penguins website, and in the spirit of open-sourcing and wiki-editing, to write and edit a novel. Together.

Check it out. There's already six chapters up awaiting rewriting and editing, and I suppose you can even add on and write the continuing chapters.

I'd have to applaud Penguin for making such an experiment. A crowd-sourced novel - whoda thunk it? As Jeremy Ettinghausen, Penguin's digital publisher, says in The Guardian:

"To be honest, we don't know exactly what is going to happen or how this will turn out. We hope people will enter into it in the spirit we intend and leave their egos at the door. It's not about individual work and individual brilliance - it's about people working together as a community".

Good luck, Penguin. I'm really interested in what will come of this.

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Ted Mahsun

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