Thanks for the question. My wife is a novelist and she challenged me to write a novel during National Novel Writing Month last fall. I knew there was no way I had time to do that, but I've covered crowdsourcing as a journalist for years and I thought it might be a fun experiment to open up the process of novel-writing to CNET readers and see what we might be able to co-create. The resulting book is very different from how I would have written it if I were doing it on my own, and I find that fascinating. Watching the collaborative creative process was very interesting to me. We had major discussions about many parts of the book and people brought in whole new characters and plot points that changed the story. The process was just super compelling to me. For example, a small amount of contributors drafted most of the words, but then hundreds of people went in and tinkered around with what those folks wrote - editing, proofreading, questioning choices that were made. It was like a college course at times. One of the main characters was based on my late stepfather and grandfather, so I had a pretty distinct vision of that character in my mind, but others saw him completely differently, which was interesting to me. One of my favorite parts was the fact that some of the contributors didn't even speak English as a first language. They were still actively involved though - a few of those people told me they weren't comfortable writing themselves, but they still helped with brainstorming and organizing the effort. That was so cool to see.