New year, new plans

So, it's 2011. We've marked off another circuit of our journey around the sun, beginning at an arbitrary point in our orbit. Yippee!

My resolution for this year: Get through a first draft of a book. What does that entail? Well... I'm not sure yet. I'm not even sure what I want to write about. But I've got all sorts of ideas constantly floating around in my head that I'd love to commit to paper, and if I can contribute something to the evolving societal zeitgeist, that'd be nice, too.

My biggest stumbling block is that I have some weird obsession with trying to write about something nobody else has covered yet. My girlfriend (rightly) reminds me just how futile this is; the chances of an idea being actually original these days, with almost 7,000,000,000 people on the planet, are next to nil. So once I get over that block, I'm sure the writing will come more easily to me. I've got all sorts of themes I'd like to cover: why freedom of religion must necessarily include freedom from religion, why morality doesn't require an absolute source to be valid, why evidence-based belief is better than faith-based belief, why I dislike postmodernist thinking and its effects on pluralism, and so on. I'd also love to write in greater length than I already have about my deconversion, and how it affected my life, my thinking, my relationships with others, and my outlook on the world.

Fortunately, I won't have to go into this totally blind. We're fast entering an era where self-published books and books published by smaller publishing companies have a good chance of competing in the market, and Hank Fox, local author and member of our atheist Meetup group, has just come out with his own book, “Red Neck, Blue Collar, Atheist: Simple Thoughts About Reason, Gods and Faith”. I haven't read the book yet, but I really look forward to it, since folks like PZ Myers and Hemant Mehta have been promoting it (and my views tend to align with theirs on many issues). I'll have to chat up Hank and see just what he had to do to get published and promote himself... but that's far in the future for me. I've still got all that writing to do...

I guess that's my resolution for 2011: Write a book. Lofty goal, sure, but I know I can do it if I put in the effort. Wish me luck!