Big Tony stretched his arm, yawned, and lazily flicked the channel from world news to a documentary on photography which aroused his interest only because of the scantily clad bathing models currently in front of the camera.
If you are wondering where this is going check out A Million Penguins a wiki novel project that was unveiled yesterday by publishing giant Penguin. This is the opening paragraph of chapter one as of midnight Friday 2nd February 2006. It may have changed by now. It is being presented in the terms of an experiment, but it could be easily called publicity.
I am not sure the term novel should be applied to a wiki that builds on a narrative network. It will be interesting to see if another term emerges along the way. According to the 'About' page for the project:
Can a collective create a believable fictional voice? How does a plot find any sort of coherent trajectory when different people have a different idea about how a story should end – or even begin? And, perhaps most importantly, can writers really leave their egos at the door? Typically, a writer will acknowledge in print the efforts of their book’s editor, copy editor and agent, since they each will have read the work in draft form. But such acknowledgments regularly include a disclaimer along these lines : “Any errors that remain are, of course, my own”.
Oh look, in the time I took to write/paste the above, the opening paragraph is now:
Big Tony stretched his arm and gave himself one final yank. He yawned, and lazily flicked the channel from world news to a documentary on photography which aroused his interest only because of the scantily clad bathing models currently in front of the camera.
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