The positive reaction to yesterday’s post from the memoirs of my great-great-grandmother encouraged me to start thinking about how to proceed.
Initially I just had a vague idea of going through the manuscript and dribbling out a bit at a time in a series of posts. But I quickly realized that’s more complicated than it sounds at first glance.
First task would be to decide how to carve out just enough for a single post. And how long should each single post be?
Not too long, I think. Maybe 1,000 words, max. That’s going to be an editing job, even if I only plan out a few posts at a time.
The manuscript is about 250 pages. Say that translates into two pages per post. Something over 100 posts. Perhaps one every several days. It could take a year to do. Too long? Will readers get hooked or bored? I don’t know.
Then there’s a simple decision. Do I double check my sister’s text against the original scans of the handwritten manuscript to see whether the typos or odd words are in the original? The editing job gets more complex if the answer is yes.
So I went ahead and looked at the first chapter. Well, actually, the first chapter was all about Ellen’s description of her family, based mostly on family lore. And those recollections are annotated by my sister, who found much of the information to be wrong, and more unsupported. So I skipped ahead to the first narrative chapter, looking to see if there are natural breaks that would assist in breaking it up.
As started reading, I could almost hear woman’s voice, perhaps with a slight southern accent, reading aloud and telling the story. My thought—A perfect serialized podcast! Oh, good idea, Ian. Even more work, editing for someone to read out loud in order to make the podcast.
Now I’m hopelessly mired in the potential complexities of it all.
I think I have to go back to the beginning. Think Little, as poet Wendell Berry once wrote. That’s the way to start. The rest can, perhaps, follow.
But then I start thinking that this is a project that could stretch out for quite a while. Does it need its own subdomain, where followers can bypass the rest of iLind.net? How hard is something like that to set up?
More complications, since we’re in Seattle for much of the next week. I shouldn’t start thinking of this kind of stuff while on vacation!
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That project will have a life of its own. However, its your ohana written down, as compared to my wife’s ohana where its not written down. It will definitely be a labor of love if you undertake it.
Ian, you have a busy mind kind of like mine. It doesn’t have to be a huge project, the likes of which I have occasionally committed to and regretted later. I would say write what you want when you want and we will eat it up no matter how you serve it.
Ian, This is the sort of thing a publisher does. Further as a historical document it has its own unique value beyond those of your readers here. As I said the passage you selected had one interesting and one important thing. She knew Mark Twain and she was in the midst of, and participated in, the vigilante period. A period before law enforcement evolved into a laws, judiciary, and police. That last has been a topic for economic historians and those in law and economics. Thus it is more than antiquarian interest, meaning those who study the past with particular attention to ancient artifacts, heritage sites, or archives and manuscripts. Somewhat different from historians who combine these with other original published source material to provide a more complete picture of how we have evolved. For instance guns and violence in the western frontier. There are historians who are convinced guns were rather rare, in the west, but levels of violence quite high. The judicial system evolved both as a system of conflict resolution and to allow productive activity. The relevance is the Supreme Court ruling on the second amendment takes one historical view of this. California played a role in the civil war and the abolition of slavery. You mentioned a southern accent what was her attitude toward these issues? Not only was California a free state, but other northwestern states were free soil. Meaning they not only outlawed slavery but banned African Americans. Any little hints about the attitude of people toward this issue would help us understand this better. So be a good citizen. While you share it with us see about publishing it.
I am very interested in this body of work. Please upload the original pages so I may read the original work scanned by your phone. Please include the chapter #1 from Bonnie. This is fantastic Ian. Very important and interesting. Please keep publishing this. Money or intellect and even Mark Twain. Wow, you cannot beat this.