Épisodes

  • Killacranky-Turning History Into a Book

    Killacranky-Turning History Into a Book
    Jun 11 2026
    I had all of the articles, and I presented them word for word. I did use Claude (AI) to help sort through all of the stories and suggest an organizational spine for the book. This episode goes through how I used AI to do this work and how I asked it to research KDP pricing.

    Book link: Killacranky
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    9 min
  • Killacranky-Annotated Memoir - Sorting Fact From Fiction

    Killacranky-Annotated Memoir - Sorting Fact From Fiction
    Jun 11 2026
    In presenting the articles my great-great-grandfather wrote, I had to separate fact from fiction. He loved to embellish, like any good southerner, with his tall tales. I used the usual sources on ancestry - like census records, etc...but I also had pulled military records, and Claude (AI) worked through various sources, matching up military history with his recollections. This episode explains various steps I took in this process.

    Book link: Killacranky
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    11 min
  • Killacranky-What do you Do When an Ancestor Writes Something Controversial?

    Killacranky-What do you Do When an Ancestor Writes Something Controversial?
    Jun 10 2026
    Almost every family history runs into it eventually: an ancestor who wrote something you can’t defend. This episode is about the hardest editorial decision there is — and why erasing the ugly parts is the real failure. My great-great-grandfather’s writing includes slurs, casual cruelty, and Lost Cause framing. I explain the line I walked — preserve the original, frame it honestly, neither sanitize nor excuse — and why a startling contradiction in the same text turned out to be the most human thing in the whole book. This episode discusses my approach to this sensitivity.

    Book link: Killacranky
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    11 min
  • Killacranky-Writing a Civil War Memoir

    Killacranky-Writing a Civil War Memoir
    Jun 10 2026
    Names and dates tell you a person existed. They don’t introduce you to who that person was. In this episode about a book I have published on one of my two times great-grandfathers' military writings, I share the moment family history stopped being a chart of dates for me — and became something far more powerful. And why anything an ancestor actually wrote might be the seed of a book. I am publishing four episodes on the process of putting this book together and how you, too, can follow the same process.

    Book link: Killacranky
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    8 min
  • How to Answer AI Questions on KDP

    How to Answer AI Questions on KDP
    May 16 2026
    KDP (the Amazon self-publishing platform) now asks questions about how AI has helped with a book's content. In writing the Loose Pearls memoir of my paternal grandparents, I definitely used AI for assistance. I walk through how I answered these questions in this episode. 📖

    Loose Pearls: A Marriage in Letters, 1945–1946 — available on Kindle and audiobook. Paperback and hardcover coming soon.
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    7 min
  • How to Write the Family Letter Memoir Manuscript

    How to Write the Family Letter Memoir Manuscript
    May 16 2026
    AI did suggest a grouping of parts and the suggested manuscript, but AI makes huge assumptions about the content unless you tell it not to or to force it to notice its own assumptions. This video describes how i, with AI help, built the manuscript of Loose Pearls 📖

    Loose Pearls: A Marriage in Letters, 1945–1946 — available on Kindle and audiobook. Paperback and hardcover coming soon.
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    17 min
  • How to Use AI for a Family Memoir

    How to Use AI for a Family Memoir
    May 16 2026
    548 letters is a huge archive. So, yes, it took me 8 years to figure out how to turn all these letters into a book. With the advent of AI tools, I felt I had a way to help me manage them and make them into an interesting book. In this episode I share the actual prompt I pasted at the start of every working session, the batch size that worked best, the approval pattern that kept me in control, the moment I caught a 150-letter mistake, the corrections I had to issue more than once, the line I drew on not marketing the book as AI-generated, and what I disclosed on the KDP publishing form when Amazon asked. If you are thinking about using AI on your own family archive — and I think more people are than will admit it — this is the inside view I wish someone had given me before I started.

    📖 Loose Pearls: A Marriage in Letters, 1945–1946 — available on Kindle and audiobook. Paperback and hardcover coming soon.

    AI PROMPT: "I am working on a book of letters between my grandparents during World War Two. I am going to upload the master log and a batch of transcribed letters. Please read each letter and propose a row for the log. The columns are letter number, date, author, written from, written to, key quotes, emotional tone, historical details, family details, recommendation of either BOOK or ANCESTRY, notes, source file, and war timeline context. State the BOOK or ANCESTRY recommendation in chat with the full source filename before writing anything to the spreadsheet. Wait for my explicit approval before appending. Make honest BOOK or ANCESTRY calls. Do not oversell weak letters. I need the exact filename of every letter recorded in the source file column. Please remember this for every batch going forward. I cannot match book or ancestry decisions back to specific files without it."
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    17 min
  • Digitizing the 548 Fragile WWII Letters

    Digitizing the 548 Fragile WWII Letters
    May 11 2026
    Before the writing, before the organizing — preservation. In this first method episode, Julie shares how she digitized over 500 wartime letters between her grandparents Woodrow and Vera Bonner, written across the Pacific in 1945 and 1946. The free tool she used, why fragile letters and a child's handwriting got photographed before anything else, and the systematic transcription quirks that ended up revealing something about her grandparents she would not have learned any other way. If you have a box of family letters in a closet, this is the episode that tells you where to start. Loose Pearls: A Marriage in Letters, 1945–1946 is available on Kindle and audiobook. Paperback and hardcover coming soon.

    LINK TO BOOK ON AMAZON
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    10 min