Happy New Nothing

Hello to over 100 people! (Not 'hello to people over 100' - I'm not sure anyone in this category signed up for updates, though if you did, then hello to you too and well done on being so technologically savvy/unarthritic.) To everyone else, thank you for signing up on the right of this sentence. It makes my small malfunctioning heart feel warm every time I see the number go up.

A very belated Happy New Year. If you made any New Year's resolutions, here's why you shouldn't have:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jan/01/new-years-resolutions1

and even though I did last year and it worked (a special prize to anyone who can remember what it was, given that I deleted the post) I maintain for some reason that my overall point is valid.

I currently have a small problem, which is that I write my best pieces when I'm troubled or discontented. At the moment I'm broadly happy, which means the wryness which stems from fury and general disconsolation just isn't there. I'm desperately grasping around for stuff to write about in my own life which won't make people reach for a bucket, but there doesn't seem to be any. (And, although this lack of inspiration is rather dispiriting in itself, it isn't dispiriting enough to inspire me, if that makes any sense.) Any tips on how to fix this ("Just slash your wrists, Ariane!") would be much appreciated.

In other news, I'm still writing Guardian columns, just finished a feature for the Independent on Sunday, and am currently working on a new show as a presenter, co-writing the script with my best friend Graham Nunn (who also did all the graphic design for the Atheist Bus Campaign). I've never done any presenting before, and have been given advice by friends to "be more natural" and "exaggerate more". Surely I can't do both? Anyhow, I've been told a million times not to exaggerate...

Lastly, I'm a bit bored with talking about me. So can we talk about you instead please? What have you all been up to?

Tour Dates, Emails & Ghosts Of Christmas Past

I have a friend who works for the BBC's monitoring department, which basically means she is a spy paid for by our TV licences. It's her job to pore over the world's media: not just TV and radio channels, but also personal blogs. The problem is, most people abandon their blogs after just a few posts, probably due to lack of motivation, or perhaps hands mangled in a rogue threshing incident - and so, my friend says, there's now a sea of ghost blogs strewn across the internet which are never deleted, merely left adrift on the web for any casual browser or BBC spy to stumble upon.

I fear that this has turned into a ghost blog. I don't want it to in the slightest - I want to update regularly with posts which make you choke with laughter till you have to beg a stranger to do the Heimlich - and I definitely don't want you to keep checking back fruitlessly to find the same old page. However, after two years, I'm also reluctant to delete the blog altogether. I'm fond of it and of all of you, its funny and supportive readers and commenters, and as I've never kept a diary, it also works as a kind of record of events in my life.

So I've come up with a solution: email updates. If you enter your email address into the new box in the top right-hand corner, you'll receive an email every time I write a new post. You can view the post in the email, then can come on here to leave a comment and/or view the other comments. This way, you won't have to keep checking back, and I won't have to worry that I'm not entertaining you. So please do sign up - it'll make me happier than Tiger Woods if he successfully gagged all his exes.

THE ATHEIST'S GUIDE TO CHRISTMAS

I'm definitely going to finish the series of blog posts on The Atheist's Guide to Christmas, but probably closer to Christmas now - apologies. However, in more exciting news, Richard Dawkins, Derren Brown, Simon Le Bon, Ben Goldacre, Charlie Brooker, Simon Singh and many more of the book's contributors have signed an original Atheist Bus Campaign bus poster, which is now being auctioned for charity on eBay at:

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Theres-probably-no-God-signed-Atheist-bus-side_W0QQitemZ330382530238QQcmdZViewItemQQptZUK_Collectables_Advertising_ET?hash=item4cec5556be

All proceeds will go to the UK's leading HIV charity, Terrence Higgins Trust. And here's a sexy picture of the poster:


Go on, you know you want it. It's crying out to you, sighing seductively, "Take me!"

We've done a just-for-fun sweepstake of what amount we think it'll end up at. My guess is £666...

MINE-A-TOUR


And finally... I'm currently doing my first tour of the UK, giving an hour-long comedy talk about the Atheist Bus Campaign (complete with music, animations and slides - it's fun, honest), and signing and selling copies of The Atheist's Guide to Christmas. I should have told you about this a long time ago, as I'm afraid I've already visited Liverpool, Oxford, Edinburgh, Birmingham, Cambridge and Brighton - but I still have seven dates to go over the next two weeks, so it would be lovely to meet some of you if you're in any of these locations. The talks are either free or only cost a couple of quid, and are open to all:

MONDAY DECEMBER 7: LONDON
Location: The Penderel's Oak, 283 High Holborn, London WC1V 7HP
Time: 7.30pm (but email me at ariane@arianesherine.com if you want a ticket)

WEDNESDAY DECEMBER 9: SURREY
Location: Lecture Theatre E, Surrey University, Guildford, GU2 7XH
Time: 4pm - 5.30pm

MONDAY DECEMBER 14: YORK
Location: Denham Room, Priory Street Centre, 15 Priory Street, York, YO1 6ET
Time: 7.15pm - 9.15pm

TUESDAY DECEMBER 15: LEICESTER
Location: Square Bar, 5-9 Hotel Street, Leicester, LE1 5AW
Time: 7.30pm - 9.30pm

THURSDAY DECEMBER 17: GLASGOW
Location: The Junction Bar, 14-16 West George Street, Glasgow, G2 1HN
Time: 7.30pm - 9.30pm

SATURDAY DECEMBER 19: LEEDS
Location: The Living Room, 7 Greek Street, Leeds, LS1 5RW
Time: 2pm - 4pm

MONDAY DECEMBER 21: SHEFFIELD
Location: University Arms, 197 Brook Hill, Sheffield, South Yorkshire, S3 7HG
Time: 7.30pm - 9.30pm

Hope to see you there!

Three - Two - One - We Have Lift-Off!

Like the late, great Magnus Magnusson, I believe in starting what you finish. Unfortunately, I've had to take a temporary hiatus from the "Atheist Book Campaign" posts, due to the book launching today! I have to do lots of TV and radio interviews, write and rehearse an hour-long conference speech, prepare for a live debate and generally try and let as many people know about the book as possible.

Thank you so much for returning to this blog and for bearing with me - I promise to finish the ABC series soon. Until then, The Guardian published a news story in Monday's paper about The Atheist's Guide to Christmas:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/27/atheist-christmas-book

On Tuesday, I wrote a defence of atheists (including a section on the book) for Comment is free:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/sep/29/atheist-guide-christmas-religion

And today, Natalie Haynes has written a beautiful piece in The Times about the book:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article6855865.ece

But as soon as this all calms down, I'll write the rest of the story. Thank you for your patience, and for all your support.

The Atheist Book Campaign: Part 2

FRIDAY FEBRUARY 6 2009

"There should be 10-12 contributors at most," the publisher advised, starting to talk as though it were going to happen. "Any more than that and the whole thing becomes a logistical nightmare." We ran through a wishlist of potential writers: Richard Dawkins? Charlie Brooker? Ben Goldacre? I told him assuredly I thought they would all contribute, though in reality I had no idea whether they'd agree.

The publisher also suggested that royalties from the book go to the Atheist Bus Campaign, but I wasn't sure. The campaign had finished, and the British Humanist Association, who had been administering donations, were understandably keen to administer the remaining funds and wrap the campaign up. (We were all thrilled at how it had gone, but the level of admin for voluntary campaigns is enough to warrant doing it as a 9-5.)

Trying to seem cool and unfazed by the publisher's enthusiasm for the idea, I said I would think it over, talk to a few atheist writer friends, and contact him again after the weekend.

As I left the publishers, feeling excited, my mind began to whirr to the extent that I nearly got hit by a bus (not an atheist one). The target for the Atheist Bus Campaign had been set at a modest £5,500, yet due to the generosity and strength of feeling of freethinkers across the world, we'd ended up raising over £150,000. A lot of people (mainly religious folk unenamoured with the ABC) had told me that we should have given the extra funds to charity. Though I agreed that it would be excellent to launch a charity initiative as part of the campaign, I'd had to explain that even if we'd wanted to, we were legally obliged to spend the ABC funds on the purpose for which they'd been donated.

This seemed like the perfect opportunity - we could try and raise as much for charity as we had for the ABC.

I called Charlie Brooker, who had kindly supported the campaign from the very beginning. "What do you reckon?" I asked.

"It's a good idea," he replied. "How many words would I have to write?"

I divided 80,000 (the average length of a book) by 10.

"Er... 8,000?" I asked.

"There's no way I can write 8,000," he apologised. "Not with my schedule."

He was right. This was nuts - nobody was going to write a piece that long. But if they only wrote 2,000 words each (which seemed reasonable), and there were only 12 contributors at most, it would be a very short book indeed. You might even call it a pamphlet...

SATURDAY FEBRUARY 7 2009

The National Secular Society Awards took place the next day, and I went along with my Dad (pictured above). I didn't win, but received a Special Award of a bus (not a full-size one, the one below), which was lovely. Richard Dawkins sat next to me to eat dessert, and I interrupted his raspberry crumble by telling him about the book.



"I'd certainly be happy to contribute!" he exclaimed generously. I felt like jumping on the table and dancing, but I didn't, because then they might have taken my award away.

Ben Goldacre was also at the awards, and seemed enthusiastic when I asked him (Robin Ince, Simon Singh and Martin Rowson were also there, and would all agree to contribute at a later date). I felt like a small hamster, scurrying from table to table, asking people more experienced than me to do me a big favour. It's very possible that they all said yes so that I'd go away and leave them in peace with their crumble - but I'm very glad that they did.

[TO BE CONTINUED...]

The Atheist Book Campaign: Part 1

A week tomorrow, on October 1st, a book is going to be published. This is not news. Lots of books will be published a week tomorrow, and indeed a week after that (and, for that matter, tomorrow). But this book, called "The Atheist's Guide to Christmas", is different for three reasons:

(a) It is the first atheist charity book, in aid of the HIV charity Terrence Higgins Trust
(b) It is written by 45 brilliant atheists, all of whom have given their time, thought and talent for free
(c) I have been editing it on a voluntary basis since February, as the second phase of the Atheist Bus Campaign, and am very much hoping it will be a success.

And so, on every day over the next week, I'm going to post up the story of how it came about...

FRIDAY FEBRUARY 6TH, 2009

What do you think of when you hear the word "pamphlet"? I think of a tiny, easily disregarded and usually rather dull booklet - the kind of leaflet-with-aspirations that gets left on trains, handed out by Jesus-happy organisations, or which you read in doctors' surgeries when there are no magazines left (free chlamydia swab, anyone? No? Whyever not?).

So when I was invited into HarperCollins to talk about writing a pamphlet, I wasn't overly hopeful. Entering a grand, picturesque publishing house to talk about writing a leaflet felt like being invited into the White House to talk about being a toilet cleaner - you're so close to all the real action, yet your own activity is a bit shit.

Things got worse when I first met the man who would become my publisher, and he asked what press I'd done for the Atheist Bus Campaign. I mentioned the Sunday Times, and made some off-colour crack about Rupert Murdoch. There was a long silence, during which I went bright red and finally realised, much too late, that HarperCollins is owned by Murdoch.

After I'd scraped myself off the floor, he mooted the idea of the pamphlet, and I espoused some of my numerous pamphlet-based reservations. He then asked whether I'd like to write the "atheism" section of a book featuring a selection of essays on various beliefs, including Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, etc. I wondered aloud who would buy it - somebody very indecisive or fickle?

Given my apparent lack of enthusiasm for all his genius ideas, my publisher then asked what I'd like to write. I sighed, "Well, it's way too late for the Christmas market now, isn't it?" He said it wasn't, and that any project would only need to be finished by July. Still, the idea of writing a whole book myself in five months was more daunting than the task of painting all the lamp posts in London with no ladder.

"Maybe we could do a collaborative book?" I suggested. "I mean, myself and a lot of other atheists? Then it could definitely be out in time for Christmas."

The publisher thought. He put his head on his hand, and wrinkled his mouth a bit, and finally asked, "What, like a kind of Atheist's Guide to Christmas?"

"Yes!" I agreed, finally feeling a bit more optimistic. "Just like that."

[To Be Continued... ]