A Million Penguins

...That's the title of an experiment in collaborative novel-writing currently taking place at www.amillionpenguins.com.

A Million Penguins is a joint project of the publishing house Penguin and DeMontfort University, Leicester, England.

So far the project has been running for around three weeks. From the initial sentence "There was no possibility of taking a walk that day", a substantial, if somewhat incoherent, novel is now taking shape.

Anyone interested in joining in is welcome to go along to the Million Penguins website and open an account (which is free, of course). A Million Penguins uses the wiki format that powers the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Anyone who has ever written or edited entries on Wikipedia should find the interface familiar, therefore.

Even if you're not interested in contributing, it's well worth taking a look at the project to see how it evolves. My view is that there is some good writing in there, along with a lot of poorly written nonsense. The novel has also been hijacked to some extent by one contributor who seems obsessed about bananas, and a live topic on the Million Penguins Blog is whether or not they should be banned. The novel is also lacking any overall theme or direction, though there are some promising stories embedded in it. Maybe wiki-novels are not the future of publishing, but I could see smaller wikis with membership by invitation only as an interesting possibility for future collaborations.

Anyway, do visit A Million Penguins and see what it's all about for yourself!