I’m waiting to go over Trials again, so I worked on my grandfather’s letters from World War II. I basically have a billion scans—I tried to make sure that scans of pages & envelopes from the same letter all stayed together, but we’re talking about (checks) fucking 780 scans! Jesus wept! That’s not counting the photographs—OK, out of morbid curiosity I looked, and those are 740 scans. This, for the record, is only a portion of the massive boxes of photos I had to scan, because God forbid anyone in my family ever just throw shit away. You’re starting to understand why I didn’t get much work done on Trials earlier in the year, right?
Anyway, I haven’t read all the letters, and scans aren’t really something you can make into a book (I guess I could just toss them into an e-book, but that’s not going to be terribly accessible to readers), so I’m basically typing them up and organizing them at the same time. I think that’s a reasonable system—I want this to be edited into something entertaining to the average reader, not just be Here Is Every Word My Grandfather Ever Put To Paper Because We Are Just THAT Impressive A Family. I still obviously have a lot to go, but even just on the first day I came across two letters that I definitely want in—his kids were little, so he tended to write one version of events for them and then another, very different version for my grandmother….