Jessamyn West described writing as “a solitary occupation.”

Family, friends, and society are the natural enemies of the writer. He must be alone, uninterrupted, and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking.

What would Ms West have to say about this, we wonder: a wiki-based collaborative novel-writing project launched today by Penguin UK (via). The working title is A Million Penguins — no harm in a bit of self-promotion I suppose — and according to the official Penguin blog, they’ve asked “a team of MA students” to kickstart the thing.

In addition to hosting the wiki-novel-in-progress itself, Penguin has contributed an editor named Jon to oversee things. Jon will post periodic summaries of the novel’s progress on a separate Penguin blog devoted exclusively to AMP.

In a blog posting which marks the launch Jon is candid about his expectations, publicly reminding himself that “some bits will be stronger than others, since naturally there will be all sorts of people, with varying degrees of talent, getting involved.” A wise man, Jon, who we presume to be a junior editor at Penguin, since it is a bit much to expect him to monitor the feeding frenzy of AMP while continuing to offer sage advice to Ian McEwan on the plotting and characters of On Chesil Beach.

Accompanied by what we imagine was a sigh Jon expands upon his hopes and dreams for AMP:

In an ideal world we could throw in a sense of plausibility, balance and humour. That’s asking a lot, and in truth I’ll be happy so long as it manages to avoid becoming some sort of robotic-zombie-assassins-against-African-ninjas-in-space-narrated-by-a-Papal-Tiara type of thing. Or whatever.

It is that final “Or whatever” which is particularly poignant; as if Jon knows deep in his heart of hearts that his hopes and dreams won’t matter one sweet damn once the publication deadline starts to loom (the AMP project runs until the end of February). That’s when the savagery will truly begin; compared to which a pod of ravenous killer whales feeding off the Ross Ice Shelf will seem like lambs in clover.

We’ve assigned a key member of the t&p editorial collective to represent us overseas — we feel the t&p POV will be a critical factor in the success of AMP. He’s started small (the collective’s first contribution is shown above) but we have been assured that the entire enterprise hangs upon his “e.”

Or whatever.