Timing is everything

Another backstory item:

As I began contacting potential contributors in early ’06, I showed a talent for doing so at the worst imaginable times. My request hit Richard Dawkins’ desk the same day his controversial documentary The Root of All Evil? aired in Britain. The same day. I contacted Penn Jillette the very week his new daily radio talk show went on the air while he was doing eight live shows a week in Vegas with Teller while wrapping the season of Bullshit while writing a film script while parenting his first infant while preparing for the arrival of his second. Julia was between an off-Broadway run of Letting Go of God and a Hollywood Bowl performance. One contributor said yes…then broke her back, I kid you not. Dan Barker and Annie Laurie Gaylor were doing what they always do – twelve things at once, any one of which would kill a mortal. Yet all but a very few eventually agreed that the project was too attractive to pass up.

I once imagined writers and editors producing their work in clean, well-lighted places, unassaulted by bills or bacteria. I am now tragically uninformed about one less thing. It is a (secular) miracle that anything like this ever actually comes to pass.