This is an open source novel. Here's the story:
In 2006, I moved to France to teach English. That same year, I discovered the burgeoning writing community around NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, a month-long writing frenzy during which writers from all over the world crank out a 50,000 word manuscript during the month of November. My teaching schedule was permissive enough that I decided to take the challenge. I finished my manuscript, lightly edited it, designed a cover, and printed a few copies, but no one ever really read it.
Not even my mom.
Fast forward 6 years. I'm a developer and avid open source contributor. I spent the weekend with my wife and some friends at the house of a friend and mentor on Whidbey Island, a haven of both rest and creativity for me. I was reading Toni Morrison's new novel, Home. And as I read, I looked out over Puget Sound and had a few thoughts in rapid succession:
I wish I could write like this.
Well, I did write that novel once.
But no one ever read it.
It would almost take a team of writers to make it great.
Like Rails, or jQuery. Or node.js.
The Open Source Novel.
I work as a software developer, and the fact that the technologies with which I make my daily living have been developed and made freely available by an army of volunteers never ceases to blow my mind. I've seen some amazing code come out of the open source community and I began to wonder why it had to stop at code.
Further, I have never considered myself a writer, and I knew it would take a lot for me to be vulnerable enough to put my work out into the world and to open it up to scrutiny and collaboration.
I believe that this story has promise, and that, witht the help of a lot of people I have never met, it could grow into something truly worth reading and contributing.
In 2006, I had this awful data entry temp job at an office in Denver. The only thing that made it tolerable was that I worked with a fascinating law student named Garreth who had moved to Denver with his fiancée after being displaced by Hurricane Katrina.
One day, we were talking at lunch, and he was relating some of the more eerie, unbelievable, and heartbreaking stories that had come from the aftermath of the storm. One that I found endlessly fascinating was that there were offices of public records that had been flooded and had lost their data on personal identification. Meanwhile, many New Orleans residents had lost their birth certificates, drivers licenses, and other pieces of identification in the flood. Garreth took a bite of his sandwich and stared past me. "The DMV had to just take people's word that they were who they said they were."
Over the next several months, I became obsessed with this detail and its implications for the concept of identity. Moses und Aron, then, is about identical twin brothers grappling with identity in post-Katrina New Orleans. It is also a secular reimagining of an unfinished opera by the composer Arnold Schoenberg about the biblical story of Moses and Aaron.
But don't worry—it's not nearly as pretentious as it sounds, and you don't necessarily have to know anything about New Orleans, Katrina, or Schoenberg to contribute. Just a love of the language and the desire to contribute to what could be a groundbreaking project.
I think of code as just one form of writing, one particular style. To me, a novel was the closest artistic analogue to code. It would be more difficult to, say, open source a painting or a piece of choreography.
But within writing, this could've been a poem, a short story, an essay. It could've taken almost any other format. But I had this novel and had been sitting on it. It also seemed to me to be most like a large framework like Rails. It is a large work, and the larger it is, the more room there is for collaboration.
Not nearly as good as it could be with a collaborative community.
I wanted to encourage as much collaboration as I could, and intuitively, I thought that encouraging people to file a pull request to fix a typo or two might be easier sell than writing a whole chapter, and that a couple small contributions would lead to something bigger.
Well, this could be the beginning of your foray into open source contribution. Creating an account is free, and even if you don't follow the typical process of forking the project, and making your own changes, just reporting issues using the project's issue tracker counts as contributing.
But if you really don't want to make an account, you can always email me your changes (to nick [at] nickcox.me) and I'll make them for you.
In short, there's a lot. Check the issues. The whole novel is roughly copy edited, but it needs some love. Also, having written it in a month, I'm not entirely certain that it is completely coherent, has a satisfying ending, and has the most compelling character development.
Glad you asked. Another part of this repository will eventually be the files to make an ebook out of this. My plan as of now is to gather as many pull requests as possible and, when it's done, publish it, prominently naming the contributors. It will be made available as an ebook or a print-on-demand paperback using a pay what you will model. The rationale for this is that, in my experience, people place a higher value on things that they pay for.
Because it is a community work, the money should go back to the community. I think the best way to distribute it will be to donate all proceeds to Dave Eggers' inimitable charity, 826 National, a non-profit that offers writing and tutoring to under-resourced students.
Great question. This is an experiment to see what a community can create besides an incredible JavaScript framework. So I'm less concerned with how many copies it ultimately sells and, honestly, how much money we raise for charity (although that will be amazing). Rather, I think that the number of contributors, the volume of pull requests, and the richness of the issue discussions will be where true success will be found.
Well, I have at least one more novel waiting in the wings.