I've been reading Mitchell Stephens' Without Gods blog for a few months now, partly because he's a friend, and partly because I love the idea of hashing out a book with your readers. It took a little bit, but Stephens has built a nice community of readers, giving us a look into the hidden world of book writing, spreading his work out on a metaphorical microscope slide.
Just listen to this...
"I realized something: It's a bit slow. Thick with ideas and facts. Thin on tales of interesting people. Tales of interesting people, to be sure, are not that easy to come by when those folks lived two or three thousand-years ago. But still. This is supposed to be a lean, concise, narrative history. Not a tome. Not exhaustive. So I'm pruning the exposition: Maybe you don't really need to know that Lokayata is another name used for the Carvaka -- the long-lived Indian materialist sect ("There is no world other than this"). And I'm trying to beef up the tales -- tales that illustrate the ideas."
You should check out Without Gods for a mind-bending take on atheism, magic mushrooms, and writing. It illustrates Chartreuse's point exactly: beautiful things happen when great writers take control of a traditionally geeky medium.
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