In October of last year, I posed the question: Daylight Atheism: The Book?, on whether it would be worth the effort to try to compile some of my writings into a form suitable for publication. The response, to my delight, was overwhelmingly positive, and that response combined with other reasons convinced me that this was an endeavor worth embarking upon.
However, the last few months – February in particular – have been a time of great activity here on Daylight Atheism, the blog. There have been far too many major world events and stories relating to atheism for me to resist writing about them. Besides that, I’m very encouraged by the steady growth this site has seen, and I want to continue to cultivate that growth with regular updates and new essays. I want to write this book, but not at the cost of letting my websites languish.
But none of that is an excuse. I owe you, readers, an update on the status of the book, and that’s why I’m happy to report I’ve finished a first draft of the introduction! Although I anticipate this introductory chapter being the shortest one of the book, it will also contain what will probably be the largest amount of new material. It uses excerpts from some of my previous essays and posts, most notably “Unapologetic,” but I’ve written a substantial amount of new content to weave it all together into a coherent theme.
With that in mind, I’d like to extend my readers an offer. For obvious reasons, I don’t intend to post the book’s content on this site in its entirety. However, I’m grateful to the regular readers and commenters who’ve made this site what it is, and I would welcome any editorial assistance or suggestions they’d like to make.
Here, then, is my offer – open to anyone who commented on the first book post, as well as all other frequent contributors (you know who you are). If you’re interested, e-mail me, and I’ll send you the first draft of what I’ve written so far. In exchange, I want to hear your feedback, whether positive or negative. What parts do you like, what parts need to be strengthened, what other topics should I touch on, and what could stand to be removed altogether? Let’s see if we can craft something together that’ll send all fundamentalists and would-be theocrats scuttling back into the darkness they came from!