Blogging the book
As you may know, I’m currently researching and writing the book Atheism for Dummies. If you close your eyes tight and believe in faeries, it’ll be available for purchase in March 2013.
The project is incredibly fun, a combination of several things I love, but the deadline is wicked. I have to write 145,000 words by Ryan Gosling’s birthday. I’ve finished 14,000 so far (doing the verbs first), so we’re looking at about 1200 words a day for the next 111 days. (That assumes I don’t rest every seventh day like some People. Pfft.)
I finally decided that rather than nurse the delusion that I’d ever get to this blog during the next four months, I’d just go on a full hiatus, lights out. But I’d hate to contribute to the word drought that’s plaguing the Internet. I also know that when I turned the lights back on in November, both of my regular readers would be out somewhere in bed with other blogs, and I’d be left here in the corner all alone, choking the digital chicken.
Can’t have that.
Becca (who was nicely aghast at the idea of putting the blog in a coma) suggested that I go into reruns of old posts. I like that. A lot of my favorite posts from a few years ago have only been read by my mother and the FBI.
Then my friend and colleague Noelle George added a cool wrinkle: why not blog my process of writing the book? Every day I’m running across new ideas, blogs, articles, books and concepts, as well as struggling with this or that issue in the writing itself. Might be interesting to keep you all in the loop with frequent, very short, erratic posts, a kind of stream-of-consciousness cyber-diary of the most insanely fun and impossibly difficult writing challenge of my life.
I’ll do a combination of the two. Ya with me? Feel free to comment any time, but I probably won’t be able to answer questions. We’ll see how this goes.