Climbing out

Chasing the Chase grant continues, and thanks to all y’all, it looks like the Foundation is going to pull down a beautiful grant! More on that in a few days. Keep voting through Wednesday, please!

So a quick catchup on Dummies. It’s been an ugly two weeks since I turned in the 50 percent benchmark. It doesn’t help that I shoved several topical Hydras like morality and mortality into this quarter. The complexity isn’t the main problem, though — it’s making a complex thing simple, which this project demands. Cutting nine heads down to one. Which, if you know your Hydras, ain’t how it works.

It also didn’t help that my research (for a section on current controversies in the freethought movement) required me to spend a day diving deep into the insane vortex of poison currently swirling around women in the movement, especially a few key spokespeople. It continues to sicken and infuriate me, and though I’ve offered support in public and private ways, I still don’t feel it’s nearly enough.

For three days after the day I spent in that poison, I couldn’t write, at least not well. Hell, I could barely think. And still the clock ticked. I went back and read everything I’d written those three days, and it was garbage. I couldn’t tell why, just that it was.

It’s amazing how completely a writer can lose confidence by writing shit for a few days.

I finally figured out what was wrong — it was the voice. The content was okay, but all the heart had gone out of it, all the lightness, all the humor that this project requires, gone. I trashed about 15 pages, and (at the risk of falling even further behind) took a few days off to focus on the Chase competition.

I’m back now, writing really well and quickly. Goody for me. But what about the women who’ve been marinating in that poison for a year? Can you imagine what it’s done to them?

The two day neural dump

I’ve always found the physicality of thought really interesting — that my ideas and memories take a physical, electrical form in my head. When I’m mentally exhausted, my head actually hurts, like an overused muscle. And when I’ve done too much complex thinking in a short time, it feels like my head is physically constipated.

That was Monday for me. I was going balls out* for the last week of this 50% benchmark, and when I got to the last chapter for that deadline — Chapter 17, “Being an Atheist in a Religious World” — I was just completely spent. Constipated. I got the chapter written, but it didn’t pop, at all. I could see that through the fog, but couldn’t see how to fix it. At all.

I turned it in, knowing there’s another round for author revisions later, then took two days off. And here’s the thing: no matter how fried and exhausted I am, that’s what it takes to fix me. Not a month, not a week — two days. I’ve seen this over and over. Whenever I hit a wall after a huge project and think I’ll need two weeks to recover, I’m back in two days.

Yesterday I looked at Chapter 17 again and my brain instantly saw what it needed. I rewrote it in an afternoon. And it pops.

Maybe it’s the standard time required for a neural dump. Anybody else have that two-day thing going?

*Origin of the phrase “going balls out.” You thought it meant what?!

Honey, there are no coincidences! Oh wait…I just thought of several

I experienced a cosmic circle of coincidence today. Working on a section about meaning in Atheism for Dummies, I suddenly remembered a Jehovah’s Witness at my door in Minnesota in 2006. “You’re an atheist?” she gasped. “So then…you think your children are just…a bunch ofprocesses?”

This brought to mind a great passage from an essay by Adam Lee, including this:

Theists…deride the atheist viewpoint as entailing that human beings are “just matter” or “just chemicals”. However, the fact is that we are not “just” any of those things, any more than a house is “just bricks” or a book is “just words”. Houses are made of bricks and books are made up of words, but not every arrangement of bricks constitutes a house, nor is every arrangement of words a book.

Just as this arrangement of words was leaping into my book, a knock at the door.

Witnesses!

Halfway there

Submitted the 50% benchmark an hour ago — 178 pages down and 178 to go. Wake me Wednesday afternoon.

Q: Joining the parrot

I won’t be working on the section on death for a few weeks yet, but it’s time to start mining your heads.

My feeling about death is pretty straightforward: I’m opposed to it. I’ve pretty much mastered it intellectually, but emotionally I’m still not a fan. Natural selection will keep me at least somewhat skittish until I get there, at which point I’ll relax completely. Engaging the insights of my fellow bits of temporarily animated carbon has helped put it in perspective for me, even bringing out the beauty and poetry of it.

So…

Q: What ideas or ways of thinking about death have been interesting, thought-provoking, intriguing, helpful, and/or comforting to you?

Note that comfort is just one element here. As I wrote in Raising Freethinkers, “The most significant and profound thing about our existence is that it ends, rivaled only by the fact that it begins.” So tell me the best things you’ve thought about that profound fact, ya mortals.

(Ding.)

You wannit fast or good?

I seem to have a choice each day: I can write fast or well. But the publisher wants both.

Yesterday I wrote fast. Today I wrote well. Maybe that adds up to a good book delivered on time. Dunno.

Onward!

The cover image

(Cheated on this post — five min a day for three days.)

When it came to designing the cover of Atheism for Dummies, the publisher did something unusual — they asked for my opinion.

This is not normal. Usually a marketing committee chooses the title and a design committee creates the cover. I was so nervous about the hundreds of bad possibilities for the title of Parenting Beyond Belief that I brainstormed and offered a title unasked. To my relief, they accepted it. I didn’t see the cover until it appeared on Amazon. After enjoying a mild coronary, I realized it was flippin’ brilliant.

This time, though, I was asked for input. Once my wife scraped me off the floor with a squeegee, I got to work thinking about it.

In a way, the only thing that matters about a Dummies book cover is the yellow and black color scheme. You can spot that sucker through fog. But it also has a single image.

I scanned the covers of the top 100 atheism books on Amazon for ideas. The most common is a solid color with text. Also popular are question marks, Earth/space, sciencey atoms, some kind of religious negation (a cross with an X, etc) , a Promethean torch, or a variation on Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam that I call “Adam Reaches for Bupkes.”

I thought about it for days, gradually making a list of ideal attributes:

– Embodies natural worldview
– Represents desire to understand world
– No religious negation
– Directly accessible/relatable (no galaxies or atoms)
– Wonder-inducing
– Aesthetically pleasing
– Not typical. Provokes thought/question. OK if connection not obvious
– Owns the illusion of design

I’d just finished researching the section on the illusion of design in nature, so that last one was floating at the noggin top. And that clinched it — I knew what the image had to be. It fits every requirement on the list.

GUESS FIRST if you want, then click to view the draft cover. Spoilers in the comments are OK, just don’t look there before you click.

No atheist Vatican

Finally finished Chapter 3, one of the hardest in the book. I’m deep fried.

This chapter (on what atheists believe and don’t believe, and why) brought out an interesting diff between my book and religious books in the series, especially Catholicism for Dummies, of which I have a copy for formal comparisons.

Inside the cover of CFD are some guarantees I can’t give my own readers:

The authors of CFD are able to assure readers that they’ve represented a body of settled doctrine accurately. But there is no settled doctrine for atheists. At best, I try to represent the range of ideas and approaches around any given issue. If there’s an apparent consensus, I try to capture that.

I wouldn’t have it any other way, of course — but it does make for a very different and much more challenging (IIDSSM) process than the good Revs were up against. Ding.