I am still working through the 1500 pages of the Greasy/My Bloggers messages that Jeri & I wrote back and forth for 15 years. I copy/pasted them from the blog messages to Word documents. When I initially combined all the Word docs, it was 7000 pages. I've been coding them to generate an index and formatting headings to make a navigation bar. Took out my messages, so it's just what Jeri had to say, and making the focus on what she said about her family.

I'm picturing the audience as Jeri's grandchildren who'd like to get to know her better, possibly years from now. It is an opportunity to find out what she really thought about a lot of things - memories of her grandmothers and parents, her extended family, and her children and grandchildren. My grandmother died at age 86, and I deeply regretted not saving all her letters.

The hard part is deciding what to edit out because the bare-bones family info loses the flavor of Jeri's personality - she worked very hard to have a nice yard and garden, she wrote a lot about cooking, had plenty to say about what the neighbors were up to, loved going to estate and garage sales, and enjoyed outings with friends. And of course all the things she said about life with Ted, which would be its own book.

Because Ted didn't have any children to care, he didn't get along with his own family, and all of Jeri's family ended up angry with him, I am taking out most of the references to his family. And trying to decide how much of what Jeri said about Ted can come out without losing the context of her life.