Wow, so I’m trying to share some thoughts about When Atlas Shirked, and I find I’m not sure where to begin! So I figure I’ll start at the beginning.
As you can tell from the archives, I’m pretty free with my thoughts once they get going, but haven’t been that good at sharing them consistently. I absolutely never saw myself able to hold a train of thought long enough to write a book. In fact, that’s the one thing I always swore I’d never be able to do.
So then one day I was sitting in a coffee shop that was hosting a regional job fair, supporting the friend who needed a ride. While she was going through the rounds of interviews, I helped keep track of other applicants’ seats and watched their stuff. Between their own interviews, I chatted with them and generally tried to help them feel more relaxed at the prospect of competing for the limited jobs that are out there.
I ended up speaking alone with this guy named Dean. The topic had turned to “where we’re from”, and I talk about coming from a relatively fundamentalist Christian background, and how I learned much from that to carry with me in all the other ways I’ve learned to learn, and so on. I then said something like, “You know, the usual.”
He then politely informed me that he didn’t see that as usual, at all. Rather, whenever talk turns to things like religion or Christianity especially, it’s generally fairly divisive in an All or Nothing kind of way. That either one is completely, doggedly pro-their-own-religion and anti-all-else, or one has renounced one’s old religion with quite some unkind things to say about where they’ve been. And that he never has seen someone so casually respectful of all people and their hopes and beliefs, certainly not sitting chatting in a coffee shop. Those weren’t his exact words, but that’s generally what I took away from what he said.
Though I resisted it at first, I soon realized he was right, which was so very wrong. Cause I think most people are somewhat aware of that interconnectedness among us, and all it would take is some decent examples to help us share it.
So, on Dean’s advice/request, I went home and started to try writing some decent examples. Within a day or so the project had taken on a life of its own, somewhat taking over mine. For months, I struggled to keep up with it as well as the rest of my full-time life, barely making it through. I wasn’t even sure just where I was going with it, just that it had somewhere it wanted to go. And that I felt pretty strongly that I had to help it get there.
And that led me to letting a book come into being, without much thought to where it was going to go once it got here. Which is not at all the way I’d recommend writing and releasing a novel, especially one you’d like folks to find and read. I definitely would have planned out target audiences, and researched how to write what they would seek out, and so on and so forth. It feels really a backwards way of doing things, now that I stop to think about it.
But if I’d ever stopped to think about it, I would have been paralyzed from moving forward. I certainly never would have written half of what went into that book. So I wouldn’t even be here, wondering what just happened.
I guess, out of all those 594 words I just wrote, that’s the lesson from this whole post. Something I’m going to go brew a hot cup of tea and have a nice, long think about.
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Nynia in the Now 