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!