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Chris OConnor 
Rhodes Scholar
BookTalk.org Owner
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Joined: 05 May 2002
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Location: Florida
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 Posted: Thu Nov 02, 2006 2:53 am Post subject: Call for essays! "How I became a freethinker"
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Call for essays!
"How I became a freethinker"
Have you ever wanted to have your story published?  Now is the time to sit down and put your story on paper for the world to read. Quality essays written by our members will be published to a special new essay section on the BookTalk site.
All members are asked to contribute.  There are no grades being given out and this is not a competition. We're looking for true stories and quality material. We'll be giving out plenty of free books as a reward for those essays that are original (never posted anywhere else), fully edited (run it through a spell-checker and have a friend proof-read), on-topic, and of the specified word count.
Our goal is to slowly build up the original content of our web site. Up until now all material written by our members was found strictly on our forums. We're going to work on developing a more professional section of our site where your writing can be featured for visitors to enjoy. We get a ton of traffic to our Home page, but most of it never ends up on our Forums page. Our new essay section will be linked to from our Home page and our Forums page sidebar. (The sidebar is under development)
So here are the guidelines for this "Call for essays"
Subject
Your essay should be about how you became a freethinker.
Length of essay
Your essay should be 500 to 1000 words. Please try to stick within these parameters, but we won't turn away quality essays that are slightly shorter or longer.
Deadline
We're not sure. Let's see what kind of response we get from the community. I'd appreciate if you started working on this right away as it would be nice to have a handful of relevant essays for the new essay section soon, but there is no set deadline. If you take a few weeks or even months we'll just add your essay when you're ready.  This new section of the site will be an ever-growing database or index of essays.
We'll be giving away plenty of free books to those members that jump into this and contribute something in a timely fashion. And I’ll probably secure even more free books from publishers so we can be somewhat liberal in passing these out. Please don’t think you don’t have a chance in getting a free book.
As of right now we have at least 6 books to distribute and several others in the mail. To start with we have 3 copies of "The Looking Glass Wars" and 3 autographed copies of "Atheist Universe." David Mills, author of “Atheist Universe,” was kind enough to also donate a pile of audio recording CD’s of “Chapter 2: Interview with an Atheist.” I’ve been listening to this recorded interview and I can assure you its good stuff!
You can pick your free book based on what we have available and it will be shipped out free of charge. But the free book is only icing on the cake. Just having your story published on the main site for visitors to read is the real reward.
This "Call for essays" starts immediately. We can create this new section of the site as soon as we have some content. I've picked this subject because we're a freethinker community and our visitors will probably be very interested in reading our personal stories about what brought us to where we are today.
Where do I submit my essay?
You can email Chris at chris@booktalk.org with your completed essay. Any and all questions about this project should be posted right here in this thread. My email address is strictly for submitting your completed essays.
Can I contribute anonymously?
Yes, you can. I'd sure prefer if you used your real name or your BookTalk name, but you're free to contribute under any name you like - provided it is G-rated and appropriate. I personally MUST know who you are, so please include your BookTalk name in your email. No essays will be posted without your BookTalk name. Again, I won't publish your name if you tell me not to, but I need to know who is writing what.
NOTE:
If this topic just doesn't excite you please tell me what does.  Edited by: Chris OConnor  at: 11/2/06 2:55 am
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