Writing a novel through the net
Kristin Gorski interviews Rick Heller from "Smart Genes" via email
An investigation! According to BoingBoing and others there was once an open source novel called "Smart Genes." What happened to this site?
After some digging, Kristin Gorski was able to contact Rick Heller, author of "Smart Genes" to ask him about his work on the crowdsourced novel.
Kristin Gorski: Are you indeed the author of “Smart Genes”?
Rick Heller: Yes, I created the Web site opensourcenovel.net for my novel, “Smart Genes.”
I don't consider the experiment to have been a success.
Basically, I had written the novel as a conventional science fiction novel, and tried to get an agent for it, unsuccessfully.
When I found out about wikis, I thought I would put the novel (most of it--not the last 100 pages, but I emailed the final pages to anyone who requested them)
I though I could get some criticism or editorial help out of it. I think it's hard for a group to create, but easier for a group to edit.
I did get links from Scripting News and Boing Boing, so the site was not a secret. But the changes made were not significant.
The main positive contribution was from a German-speaking person who edited a German language e-mail I had in the otherwise English-language text.
Probably the most active user was a vandal who figured out that the wiki software I used wasn't secured properly for anonymous users -- it allowed one anonymous user to rollback changes made by another anonymous user, assuming they were the same user. This user extensively rolled back anonymous changes and ended up destroying some changes that were made to the point that they could not be recovered. I later contacted the wiki's author about this problem.
After a year, I let the domain name expire. The novel is still unpublished.
3/25/07
