Naked Came the Manatee - Raw Notes

This is research data only for an ongoing crowdsourced novels review of Naked Came the Manatee.

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NCTM by the Numbers

Brain Child of Tom Shroder - then editor of MH Tropic

Inspired in part by Naked Came the Stranger written in 1969 by 20-25 writers and editors from Newsday under the pen name Penelope Ashe.

13 South Florida Authors - Dave Barry, Les Standiford, Paul Levine, Edna Buchanan, James W. Hall, Carolina Hospital, Evelyn Mayerson, Tananarive Due, Brian Antoni, Vicki Hendricks, John Dufresne, Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen

Editor - Tom Shroder

100,000 copy first printing

Money went to charity

Originally ran in Miami Herald Tropic Sunday magazine starting in late 1995. Printed in weekly installments. Each author got one week to write a chapter for the next Tropic issue.

Partially inspired Naked Came the Pheonix.

Story synopsis

Genre - Humorous crime novel
A manatee named Booger becomes embroiled with some of South Florida's top fictional crime solvers, Jimmy Carter, and what might be the cryogenically frozen head of Fidel Castro.

Comments

Form used repeatedly for pranking hypocrisy - NCTS and Atlanta Nights

Fun seems to be key component in NCTM, NCTS, and Atlanta Nights.

In the case of NCTM strong editor plus strong talent lead to successful(Highly visible, many copies published) novel.

Established authors working with existing characters. Chapters published as they are completed - no rewrite possible. Each writer was working to make the next chapter more difficult for the author of that chapter. This forced later writers into a corner. (This was especially true as Booger's level of sapiency kept rising from chapter to chapter until one of the writers dumbed the manatee down again.

Questions

How has the advent of the virtual teams/communities directly impacted the way people create collaborative projects? (Need to ping CB for source material.)

What does a collaborative piece bring to writing?

Reviews

By PHILIP GAMBONE
Published: March 2, 1997 in New York Times

...there's the pleasure of listening to these masters play with the language and conventions of the mystery genre, manipulating cliches (yes, there's a moon over Miami) and dopey lines, picking up threads previous chapter writers have left behind while deftly upping the ante. ''Naked Came the Manatee'' is a deliciously twisted paean to South Florida...

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9904E1DC123EF931A35750C0A...

http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=2302
By Suzan Revah March 1997

Collaboration has never come easy to writers, notorious for being creatures of thin-skinned ego. But in a new book by 13 Miami-based writers called "Naked Came the Manatee," too many cooks in the kitchen turns out to be a lot of fun.

http://www.elmoreleonard.com/index.php?/stories/fullrecord/the_odyssey_c...
Publishers Weekly review

Other Sources

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlanta_Nights - Sci fi writers expose PublishAmerica as a vanity press by writing a really crappy Sci Fi novel.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_Came_the_Stranger - Newsday writers attempt to prove that people would by any old piece of trash as long as it was about sex.

http://www.iblist.com/book8338.htm - Naked Came the Pheonix

http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/stranger.html - Naked Came The Stranger