Successful Kickstarter!

Successfully funded!

While I was running the Grandmother Fish Kickstarter campaign, I let this blog go silent. The good news is that our Kickstarter was successful, the book is due out early next year, and the blog is back! We raised over $36,000 with over a thousand backers, which means that a lot of people got excited about this book. Karen Lewis, my artist, really came through with some amazing artwork. My personal highlight was getting the thumbs up from Daniel Dennett and Steven Pinker, two of my all-time favorites. Overall, the response was amazingly positive, and now I have connections in the world of science communication, and it’s gotten me excited about doing more science for kids. 

If you want to see what Grandmother Fish is about, see our Kickstarter page.

If you want to preorder your own copy, see our online preorder store.

The cutest thing you can see is our highlights reel of parents reading the book to their children for the first time. 

Several people have suggested next books for me to write. A popular suggestion is climate change. Climate change is the great big impending catastrophe that doesn’t scare us into action even though we see it coming. Once I got into evolution circles through Grandmother Fish, I was basically in climate change circles, too. Lots of overlap. But how would I write a children’s book about climate change that describes the situation and doesn’t make children cry? Does the parent say, “ That’s right, my child. You and I are killing the planet every day just by leading our daily lives”? Not sure how to make that issue into a children’s book that a child would want read to them a second time. 

Another popular topic is prepping nonreligious children for encounters with religious classmates and friends. Lots of parents report that their kids don’t even understand the question when their peers ask things like, “Are you saved?” A children’s book that explains religion to nonreligious kids—that would attract some attention. Also, plenty of atheists would probably hate it because the book wouldn’t say that religion is a mental illness or a virus. Robert Wright, Nicholas Wade, David Sloan Wilson and former ministers who are now in the atheist movement have all documented some actual good that religions have done. I would keep it positive, but being positive in itself will be controversial.

More science is a another thought. Personally, I like the self-referential nature of Grandmother Fish, and I have been trying to imagine how I would make a second book that also helps a young person place themselves in the world. Maybe it would be about speech, consciousness, or the vast scale of the universe. Grandmother Fish is so special that it will be a hard act to follow. 

Promoting Grandmother Fish also got me involved in the local secular community, and I even went the the Atheist Alliance of America’s national convention here in SeaTac in July. I would go to lots of places to meet Steven Pinker, which I did. As I expected, the secular community includes a lot of people who love to mock religion and who are turned off by anything touchy-feely, such as community or ceremony. But I was also surprised to find a number of people who don’t see the appeal in making fun of Christians. One staffer told me she was a spiritual atheist, which you don’t hear every day. Others seemed to voice a desire to have a venue for a real community, with a lot of interest in Sunday Assembly, the nonreligious “church.”

Being away from the blog and running the Kickstarter means that I have a number of interesting experiences and topics to start blogging about. My plan is to go back to my weekly format, posting on Sundays. Thanks for reading!