So, obviously I’ve been a bit focused on my grandfather’s World War II letters, and I realized today that I’ve typed up maybe 40% of the letter pages I have. (Whether to include photos or not will be another issue, and will probably depend on how easy Amazon has made that process—doing photos for The Weirld was kind of a pain.)
Anyway, at this point I think it’s clear that I do have a book here, and I will probably not excise huge portions of the letters. I was a little worried because my grandfather did tend to natter on about needing a wrench to fix his watch and some film, please, but assuming the remaining 60% of pages are like the initial 40%, the letters are actually pretty interesting. I didn’t realize this, but he was pretty close to some of the men who were leading the mad scramble to have medical men & supplies where you needed them when you needed them, which was no small task during World War II. (One surgical facility he was at went from 80 patients to 500 within a couple of weeks.) Even when he wasn’t in a leadership role, he was a close observer, and decisions to, say, not allow patients to stay in the hospital more than a few days before sending them on to a convalescent facility had a big impact on him.
So, I think this project is worth moving ahead on, and it’s nice to have clarity there. But I’m going to put my focus back on Trials for a bit, since I’m pretty close to it being ready for a beta read, and it would be nice to send it out. I’m a little concerned that I’ll be in production for both books one right after the other, but I’m not planning on doing a paper book of my grandfather’s letters, so it shouldn’t be too bad. (Famous last words….)