A Million Miles
Just a quick word from your unwinsome editor, who’s done another bout of transatlantic travel this weekend. The upshot is that I concocted a theory about the wikinovel on the plane; but I haven’t slept in a couple of days and explaining my theory demands concentration. More soon, mes amis.
Powered by FireStats
February 26th, 2007 at 12:53 am
do tell,
cheers,
Paul
February 26th, 2007 at 4:46 am
looking forward to hearing it….
my family often drift off to pile on more potato salad when they ask “what is new?” and I have just written some theoretical work…….you have some kin here so we will not head off! ………interested in the theory….maybe about the space this project inhabits in the wiki…collaboration….metatext….. a good story….community ……..nonlinearity……….
February 27th, 2007 at 11:19 am
Define unredeemable vulgarity.
February 27th, 2007 at 12:20 pm
yeah, now I remember. Sorry. I was a bit drunk when I wrote that.
February 27th, 2007 at 9:25 pm
This is a great experiment. I wonder if the same dynamics that govern the Wikipedia will work for a novel. A novel involves storyline, characters that have to interact in meaningful ways that move the story along, and the right balance of narrative description and dialogue. It’s a guess, but I would say the publishing world may have a struggle trying to pour the content genereated from a Wiki into a traditional novel format - at least not without substantial editing.
I’m wondering if stories could be more easily generated from individuals acting in simulated worlds - something like Second Life. Characters could interact, have dialog, and be part of a community (with all their norms and idiosyncracies). Content could be automatically captured by the hosting platform and turned into stories.
February 28th, 2007 at 2:16 am
The novel is being “americanised”. ’s’ is being replaced by ‘z’. Double l’s are disappearing all over the place and u’s as well. Except for obvious spelling errors, these wonderful cultural differences should be retained. Thankfully none of our characters drive cars.
February 28th, 2007 at 3:34 pm
Each time I visit this blog I’m struck by the loyal commenting. ConstructionDestruction, Sentinel68 in particular. You’ve got to love that level of support.
Your penultimate (I enjoy using that word whenever possible) post citing some of your metrics, 9000 edits, quarter million page views—impressive.
Mr. Masters make a salient point above, i.e., advancing the wiki concept to a virtual platform. Perhaps a future Penguin endeavor replete with an SL Penguin avatar?
February 28th, 2007 at 9:06 pm
I like the idea …..I was part of a journal of critical theory published within second life called “flack attack” it had editorial staff meeting in second life with avatars meeting in a place called the port and it was in a wiki
I think a million penguins would be perfect
there are other cool ways to go too like what if it somehow has options to see the different versions over time as sort of screen shots in a lifespan of a growing project or visuals that shift with edits too …..
March 1st, 2007 at 12:30 am
Hello everyone. This is puppy. This is an excellent project. I am very impressed with it. One thing though. I do find that when someone goes into the text and writes what is clearly a direct reference to the writers or the writing style (not even attempting to disguise this with literary irony or parody) that this is arguably not literature. So, to me when someone comes in and refers to the contents as ‘twaddle’ or as the writers as ‘undergrads’ i find that offensive and hardly adding to the text. I feel such references need to be deleted. I don’t like deleting things, but really, although there is a fine line in all these matters, i don’t think any text itself should be expected to contain its own self-condemnation (as opposed to subtle critique or parody)
March 1st, 2007 at 2:19 am
You might possibly have misinterpreted the writer’s intentions.
Looking forward to some positive contributions:
(from today’s history)
Welcome; 09:53 . . (-1,610) . . Puppy (→Mirror)
Welcome; 01:51 . . (-2,282) . . Puppy (→Brain Food)
m Novel A Section 4; 01:39 . . (-659) . . Puppy (→Yellow & Bent)
m Welcome; 23:58 . . (-586) . . Puppy (→Genesis)
March 1st, 2007 at 3:14 am
did i understand you to say, we, the beguiled penguins are busy writing about the narcissistic penguins in ruinous americanized english much as an assassin would carefully prepare poisons, stillettos, daggers, capes, and batons, all with lethal and metaphysical import, so as to cause alarm in the general populace yet dismay no one acquainted with go or chess, as these variants are simply anachronistic pronouns attempting to save a dying planet from each other?
March 1st, 2007 at 3:58 am
I like what i see construction/destruction. My contributions are very positive, and have acted after carefully reading the blog discussions and the text and seeing the continuity (and yes I can see a continuity there) that I find and then coming across these weird references having a ‘go’ at the writers of the text. I think i understood the reference correctly.
March 1st, 2007 at 9:05 am
postmodernism
self referential text is a long standing trope of fiction
vonnegut for example……and joyce wrote a novel as a mobius strip (the final line loops back to the first upon careful reading)
it isn’t insulting here…..several people are simply using it to attempt to link the many threads and continuing references to the penguins, writing etc….
March 1st, 2007 at 10:11 am
Not to mention Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller, which is always intensely conscious that it is a fiction being read by a reader. A Million Penguins adds a new layer to that, since here the authors are also speaking to each other inside the text. I wonder if they make a clear distinction between who is author and who is character? Especially since most people use nicknames, which is itself interesting and very similar to the multi-layered conversations which go on in chatrooms, MOOs, and Second Life etc
I wonder whether these people will come out with their hands up at the end!
A couple of weeks ago I tried to add an author’s listing so people could give themselves credit if they wished, but it was deleted within 30 mins. I restored it a couple of times then gave up, and nobody since has attempted to create a similar list so presumably the person who deleted mine was closer to the zeitgeist than I was!
March 1st, 2007 at 11:11 am
You could start a “Come out with your hands up” discussion in this blog and those who wish to reveal themselves could own up. Then again, you may be none the wiser since everyone here’s a story teller. People could publish their own profile (so the DMU team doesn’t have to guess!). For example: “mildly obsessive nit-picker who loves writing.”
I suspect that a zeitgeist might appear in the novel sometime soon.
Still waiting for that well-developed theory and can’t find “unwinsome” in the dictionary (but did find zeitgeist).
March 1st, 2007 at 11:16 am
Hi Sue,
I am guilty, i deleted your attempt to have a list of authors. Sorry…. well… actually.. only a little sorry, because I truly feel that it might have taken the novel too much into differentiation of identity rather than attempting to unify as much as was possible… or at least gestalt…
I too fully and completely support the self referential and I have engaged in that too, in order to unify themes and also it seems to me that the unique aspect of this project is that it is about a community writing a book and it would be a shame, it seems to me, to not have that at some level show explicitly in the text.
In my understanding of the text as it shows, there are (fictional) authors eg Jim and George and Carlo and etc… and they are writing a novel in which fictional versions of themselves exist, in which some of those characters are writing about fictional characters with the same name. At times it is hard to tell which is which but occasionally the context hints at whether this is the author or the character speaking. Sometimes these characters names are the real authors of the wiki novel, but mostly i suspect they are just fictionalised characters. I have not invented any or many characters but have utlised already invented chachters in texts…
i for one am not relectant to share who I am but am hesitant to do so in case it all becomes about the many, many contributors rather than the project. Cheers to you all.
Paul
hope you are sweetsweet with that
March 1st, 2007 at 11:18 am
ps. i actually inserted a reference to Calvino’s if on a winter’s night a traveller in my first contribution to the novel. It didn’t survive but the cloven viscount did tee hee
March 1st, 2007 at 1:08 pm
the more I think about it, at the end of the project it would be very interesting for people to share a little about who they are and where they are from. it will give a wonderful taste of the diversity of locations, cultures etc. cheers
March 1st, 2007 at 2:10 pm
Hi everyone. I’ve been doing a bit of thinking about this wiki environment and how it could evolve over the last couple of days and I think one of the most exciting possibilities would be to use it to spin a yarn from multiple perspectives. I dont really know how to explain further, so I’ll give ya an example
Let’s say one of the wiki contributers had a history in law enforcement, another in Corrections, another had been a prison inmate at some point and another a Truck driver. The four could get together and write a fugitive style story with each adding the slang, tactics, opinions and culture of their area of expertise. Basically the authors would each play a character who would react to the other characters more authentically. A romance novel written from both the male and female perspectives simultainiously might be interesting too. I hope that made sense, I’m pretty tired.
So I tend to agree with Sentiel68. If we knew a little bit about each other, we might find some interesting connections and possibillitys arise.
And a quick question. Am I suppost to put these ” ” around what a person is thinking to themselves or what?
Thanks.
by the way I’m New Zealand born, Australian bred, Irish name, Scottish blood. I like to run while it’s raining.
March 1st, 2007 at 8:46 pm
Hi, interesting idea random,
It could be good. I would like to see that flow from what is already there, or start in an alternative section though so it doesn’t wipe the work already done.
ps, i think there are two different styles of parenthesis…
one is the traditional ” ” style,
but i have seen quite effective novels and writing where both internal and external dialogue was indicated merely by commas…
eg:
Jim sat and thought to himself, this is really nice. He took the pen from the table and said out loud to George, this should be a great experiment.
cheers
March 2nd, 2007 at 12:31 pm
Thanks for clearing that up for me Sentinel. I’ve been wondering about that for a while.(Maybe I should read a bit more eh.) I think it’s probably a bit late in the game to start anything new now anyway, but I was just thinking about possible ways that this thing could evolve in the future.
Maybe next time, if there is a next time, we could start with a brainstorming session to determine genre, a bit of a plot and maybe some character back story/bios. Then maybe divvy up X amount of chapters between Y amount of contributers and let everyone knuckle down for a while. finally everyone could proof read and edit each others work untill we ended up with a story of a universally fit flavour. or not.
March 2nd, 2007 at 1:47 pm
Yes I too think that is a good idea. I mean, the most frustrating thing is that the genre keeps shifting and attempts at continuity get lost, all quite innocently because there is not an effective way of sharing different visions for the direction one or another is thinking….. I really think this project would have benefitted from a linear discussion section like this blog. I have not been able to negotiate myself around the discussion page… it looks to me like the scrawlings on a whiteboard…all good but hard to make sense of (that could just be me of course). Wheras, a blogsite like this one seems easy to follow the order or posts and replies… etc….. I reckon if the discussion section was like this blog it might have been significantly different… but i still like what is on the wiki novel site - it - to me - is very interesting.
I also think that a unified and progressive plot needs clarity of vision. I am all for the variety we have gotten here… but anything clearer or more traditional in terms of standard plot development, requires a very clear common vision.
I have little bias too… i can’t stand weak starts and weak endings… whilst i love the variety that goes on… i can’t understand why anyone would seriously want to start a novel with ‘monkeys clicking at keyboards’ and the like……. likewise.. i can’t fathom the constant ‘extra endings’ that keep getting added to the end of the novel… it appears to have an ending… and any more endings and we will be mistaken for final instalment of the movie Lord of the Rings - Return of the King… it had about twelve ‘ending scenes’ and by the end i was thinking to myself… ‘end already’, ha ha.
March 2nd, 2007 at 1:52 pm
my first experience of a progressive novel was a book i read years ago called “the floating admiral.” It was produced by the ‘crime club’ bookclub or some such… it featured well known novelists… and it was a murder mystery genre….. (The Floating Admiral is a collaborative detective novel written by members of the Detection Club in 1931. The contributors included G. K. Chesterton, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ronald Knox, and Freeman Wills Crofts).
So the concept in print goes quite a way back. That format was 1. there was an established genre. 2. Someone wrote the first paragraph, and each author built upon (could not delete) the previous chapters. then one author wrote the conclusion, but the novel had an appendix with each author’s synopsis for how they thought it should end and what they were trying to lead the story to conclude. fascinating. apparently there was another one in that series too.
March 2nd, 2007 at 2:01 pm
Hi, sorry to post three in a row but one final thought for now. I am trying to keep positive and enthusiastic but i feel that the ‘team blog’ has frequently been negative and depracating. I have tried to ignore it, but comments likening the wiki to a party that has gone on too long and a better one is actually up the road, is really a put down.’ I think if one is going to start off a project where ‘egos are left at the door’ might i humbly suggest that ‘judgementalism and snobbish superiority’ could also be happily left on the coat wrack.
To paraphrase a great man : “let the one who is a published NOVELIST be the first to cast a stone”
March 2nd, 2007 at 2:08 pm
(correction i meant ‘rack’ not ‘wrack’) tee hee
March 5th, 2007 at 3:44 pm
sentinel - it was a personal feeling (not expressed by me as it happens) from one of us whose job has been to watch for spammers, block persistently offensive contributors etc which can be very jading.
Noticing how the keen and effective contributors had mostly gone away, is also jading.
Don’t take it personally! you’ve been doing great work on the editing (and writing too maybe, I haven’t checked)
March 6th, 2007 at 5:59 pm
Thanks Joanna, I appreciate your feedback… I do realise it was not your comment. I suppose it was a cumulative reaction. If one looks back at the team blog and lets them build up in one’s sense of meaning.. it started to feel like there was an unpleasant tone developing….. but i do appreciate your perspective on this.
March 7th, 2007 at 8:57 am
Amen.
Here endeth the lesson.