Sturgeon's Law

On Ron Silliman's blog, I found a link to A Million Penguins (sounds like they stole the title from Jordan), Penguin's new collaborative wiki novel project. While the concept of wikis is lovely and works nicely on a small scale, their execution on a large scale (see: Wikipedia) thus far is always interesting and potentially valuable but also deeply flawed, and their creators have a tendency to pat themselves on the back far out of proportion with the good they've actually done. Anyway, if something can serve as a reminder that many more people think they have a great novel in them than actually do, this ought to do it. Here's the second paragraph of the novel-in-progress as I'm typing right now. It's Bulwer-Lytton worthy:

Mikhael could not remember the last time someone he did not know had dared call him Sasha, or dare yell at him, did he not know who he, Mikhael Vladlen Lomonosov was? He thought the man must either be new to Riga, crazy, or incredibly bold, maybe someone useful for some particularly risky business ventures he was planning.

The whole piece is also rife with grammar, capitalization, and punctuation errors, not to mention that the little bit of the first chapter I read is narratively incoherent, full of ham-handed exposition, and just all around sub-high-school. I'd describe the project itself as a fascinating train wreck mess that was initiated either by utterly foolish idealists or by cynics in search of publicity, but the end product doesn't rise anywhere near that level--it's just a mess.