VBC — Vancouver Writers Leap to Take on the 24 Hour Book Project
The sudden snowfall yesterday morning may have slowed them down but it didn’t stop five Vancouver writers and their support team from convening at the W2 Media Cafe to work on their contribution to the international 24 Hour Book Project. Spearheaded by Spread the Word, a London, UK writers’ development organization, this experiment in collaborative writing involved writers and editors in London, Delhi, Kuala Lumpur, and Vancouver and resulted in the novel Leap, published earlier this morning.
Yes, you read that correctly. The book was written yesterday by 29 writers around the world and was published as an e-book this morning.
Each city was responsible for one character and through digital means they were able to collaborate with each other to ensure that the end result was not a jumbled mess. Accepting the challenge for Vancouver were Arley McNeney, Alyx Dellamonica, Alex Leslie, McKinley M. Hellenes, and Jenn Farrell. From about 7:30 am until 3 pm they planned, talked, and wrote.
(clockwise from top left): McKinley M. Hellenes and Alex Leslie were two of the writers who got together before 8 a.m. yesterday to start writing the Vancouver parts of the novel Leap; Sean Cranbury kept on top of the communication between the project’s sister cities and London HQ; early insights into the Vancouver character, Win. (photos by liisa hannus)
Sean Cranbury, the Vancouver organizer for this challenging endeavour and the man behind the W2 Real Vancouver Writers’ Series, Books on the Radio, and the Advent Book Blog, described how Vancouver became involved in the project.
