You must be kidding!

Writing one book is going to be tough enough, surely?!

Well, maybe, but writing a whole series of books shouldn't be all that much more difficult because of the way I have designed the database.

So, how come more than one book then?

As we go through life, we both make and lose friends and acquaintances.

Someone once described our lives rather aptly as being like a train journey, where most of the people in our carriage keep on changing, as we arrive and leave from each "station".

Some key people, especially in our family and our normally only slowly changing circle of really close friends, have known us for a great many years; others, only for a relatively short time.

The way that the database and "application" (that's the pages and pages of code that enable all of the functionality to work properly in and also behind the user interface that you are looking at right now on this web-page) have been set up greatly facilitates our writing not just a general autobiography but many slightly or even wildy different "editions" of our life-story.

We can personalise the books on the lines of one book entitled "Dear A" and another book called "Dear B", where each book only includes that which we consider might be of real, genuine interest to either "A" or "B".

How could this work in actual practice?

Well, here are just a few examples:

• A husband could write a book as a special gift for his wife, perhaps to celebrate an important anniverary, and vice versa;
• A husband and wife, or two partners, could write a book together celebrating their long relationship;
• Parents could write books either to their individual children, or to all of their children together, and vice versa,
• Grandparents could write a book to their grandchildren, individually or together, and vice versa;
• Someone could write slightly different, individual books to each of their best friends;
• People who are terminally ill could say their goodbyes and leave their messages to family members and friends in a form that the author would then feel would stand the test of time;
• The owner(s) of a company could write up the story of how everything started and then continued, mentioning some or all of their employees, perhaps as part of achieving some important milestone;
• A priest could write up his memoirs of his time in the parish and leave something tangible to his or her parishioners and vice versa;
• Likewise, people who have set up charitable organisations could explain their various spurs and motivations to do so with a record of all their achievements.

These would all be like "extended letters" and not necessarily written with a view to selling the finished works.

The language one would use, for instance, when writing a book to a young child would obviously be very different to one addressed to the same child but designed only to be read when the child had grown up.

Indeed, one could write a whole series of books to be handed over at later dates, for instance upon attaining certain ages or upon marriage or the birth of a first child. That might be an approach grandparents could take, and especially if they were "getting on a bit in years".

Once all the memories, photos and scanned images are in the database, we can "export" them all to slightly or very different books at very little extra cost