Group Novel

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Location: Silver Spring, Maryland, United States

I'm a geek and musician in the Washington DC-area. I love open source software, ukuleles, creating YouTube videos, teaching people things, play, boosting personal autonomy, community building, self-directed learning, libraries, storytelling, math, the maker movement, edcamps, the great indoors, barns, dance, poetry, entrepreneurship, mnemonics, and I forget the rest.

Saturday, September 03, 2005

Group Novel Instructions

Here are instructions for participating in the group novel titled Pennsylvania Free

If you'd like to write a chapter of this collaborative, public domain novel,
go right ahead. Multiple versions of the same chapter will be linked to.

Kindly place your chapter on a separate Blogger.com blog, using the template named Scribe.

Send me the web site address of your blog (i.e. http://mychapter.blogspot.com) and I'll link to it. You do need to state which chapter number you have written. The subject of your email needs to be: PennFree. My email address is: pshapiro@his.com

Blogger is not the ideal tool for a group writing project of this kind, but it ought to work pretty well until a better tool is invented.

I hope people who are non Internet users will be able to participate in this group writing project. If you know of someone who might contribute a chapter to this novel, thanks for typing up their thoughts for them and posting them on a Blogger.com blog.

Chapters can be short or long. The minimum length for a chapter is 2 paragraphs.

I'm working on this project as a volunteer, so please understand if i'm not able to answer all personal email about this project. There is currently no completion date for this project, although I expect it might wrap up before the end of 2005.

This project has been inspired by several persons -

Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway and FIRST youth robotics competition.

Jimmy Wales and the Wikipedia.

Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive.

Esther Dyson, because of her wide-ranging interests.

Linus Torvalds and the GNU/Linux project.

The founders and managers of Slashdot, which gets 18 million unique visitors per month. In the next year or two, this number will rise to 50 to 100 million unique visitors per month. That growth will happen about the same time you decide it ought to happen.

Grateful thanks also to Ev, Woz, Steve, Sergey, Larry, and Eric.

This project was initiated by Phil Shapiro and the Benson Family of Bethesda, Maryland.

For those who might be interested, other stories, satire and nonfiction I've written can be found in the stories section of my personal web site. I owe a huge debt to Gary Dauphin, of Louisiana, who generously created an animated Macromedia Director version of one of my first stories, They Forgot to Plant an Acorn on the Moon. and Kimberly Race, of Oklahoma, who created a Flash animated version of The Great Ping Pong Ball Experiment.

For all your homeschoolers out there, thanks for spreading word about this group writing project. Some of the most creative writers out there are homeschoolers.




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