Starting At The End...

So I've been batting around a book idea for years, collecting stories and anecdotes for it, but I felt I was missing one key ingredient: offspring.

The book I had been planning was to be called "Grandfather Tales" and was to chronicle miscellaneous events and life's lessons that had come into my experience.  Of course, given the title, one would expect I had at least one grandchild.  But no, not even one child has come and I do not see this as an option for me personally.  Though I'd love to raise a child better than I was myself raised, I fear I would do as Henry Kissinger once said about the Kennedy team: 'We will not make the same old mistakes.  We will make our own.'

So... no children on the horizon and I start to wonder whether the book's title should be changed to something more appropriate like "How To Avoid Being Stampeded" or "The Circus And The Shovel" or "Kerosene and Hornets Don't Mix".  I figure the story titles might make for a grabbing book title, but then I come across other issues.  Does the first option make the reader court danger just to try to avoid being stampeded?  Does the second title make one believe you need a shovel to be a good circus worker?  If so, for what would it be used?  The third title option just makes me seem like I'm cruel to lower life forms.

In any case, life's lessons are best when repeated to others to enlighten and, as I hope, to entertain.  Some things, to be sure, should not be spoken of in a public manner, not because they would harm one's current reputation or even one's "legacy", but because to speak of them even in the most off-handed fashion is to almost encourage people to do the very thing you advertise as a mistake in your own life.  It allows your reader to say "Hello, he did this-and-that and still he abides well and seems to have profited in life none the less."  (Or they would speak that way if they lived @ 200 years ago.  I need to read more modern prose to get my head out of the 18th century.  My prose suffers to imitate whatever I am currently reading, so today I am blaming Ben Franklin's Biography.)  An example of what not to say in this type of book is in Franklin's Biography where he says: "And this Persuasion, with the kind hand of Providence... preserved me... without any wilful [sic] gross Immorality or Injustice that might have been expected..."  In the footnote of the Franklin Papers Collection edition I am reading it is noted that Franklin crossed out the words "some foolish intrigues with low Women excepted, which from the Expence were rather more prejudicial to me than to them."  So it would seem to me that Franklin also considered those words to fall into the category of TMI (Too Much Information) and, for his reasons or my own as above, he chose not to have them in his final edition.

So to sum up I feel I want to do a book on the line of autobiographical sketches but without self-serving, legacy-building nonsense.  The question now is whether I could make it profitable to myself and to others.  Profit of the mind and heart, not money, being my foremost consideration.  Therefore, to try the ideas for a spin, I think I'll post a few of them on this blog.