Mum and Dad have their 60th wedding anniversary soon. Mum has been doing a monthly writing group for at least 8 years called "my story" where they write a bit about themselves on the theme for the day (in mum's case about 3 pages). My parents were quite taken with two books that a cousin did for her parent's 60th wedding anniversary - one per parent. In a fit of stupidity (I had only ever seen the eight stories mum had typed into her computer, so I had no idea how much there was), I suggested editing the whole lot as mum's book. Mum said that some of it wasn't on the computer - I said I would do that (mum has carpel tunnel), and a week later mum phoned me to say she had typed in the lot (so she must be terribly keen). There is a lot of duplication and every story also needs to be tidied up and put is some sort of sequence. There are a number of individual files plus two with lots of stories in them. These two are currently each 30,000 words (after a lot of duplication has already been removed - I think they both started with at least 50,000 words). So that is the first book. Maybe you could call what I am doing "editing".
The second is dad's story, which hasn't been started. Dad is uncooperative.
The third is the men from my family who went to the first world war. There were men who died on the way to Gallipoli. There were the ones who died. There were the ones who came back and were shell shocked drunks for the rest of their short lives, or the one who was blown up and buried by a shell, dug out alive, tried to walk around the camp for nine days, and was eventually sent to hospital and home and never walked for the rest of his very short life. There was a pilot (who lived!) and a general who doesn't seem to be mentioned in any book I can find. None that I have yet found died in the landing itself, but I haven't found everyone yet.
I used to write a lot of proposals at work, but I haven't written before. They are mainly non-fiction, but mum's book includes at least one piece of fiction and two poems.
