I think that sounds really good Janelle. It does need to be longer, with more historical background and more about how our group developed. 

I think that it would be way too confusing and boring to simply use our threads as topics. It's hard enough for us to follow a thread with 30 participants, let alone some outside party. This is what I envision:

1. Marg or someone definitely should make up some satirical and witty chapter titles other than the standard boring ones.

2. Each chapter should start with a quote from one of our threads that summarizes or speaks to the nature of the topic of said chapter. Marg's Xanada post would be good to start the intro with. 

3. Through out each chapter we should be in posts or sections of threads that pertain to the given topic.  Make it a combination of narrative and snippets of our threads.

4. We need to narrow down our theme. If it's too wide and varying people will get lost. Either the focus is us and our support group in the word of technology (in which case our chapters and topics would pertain to how we have supported each other in the ways you can when you live thousands of miles apart, through illnesses and death and loss of friendship and all the  million challenges we face as mothers in an isolated nuclear family), or our group is secondary to all that we have learned and debated and discovered about all the steps of parenting, from conception through to discipline (ie think of all the topics on Baby Centre for the topics we could discuss, and the realities of life as a mom in the 21st  century and how we have learned from each other about cultural and societal differences and how to work through these challenges).

I've never written a book before, but I think deciding on the structure of the book, and the main theme, what the book is *about* needs to be done before we start writing. Otherwise the writing will be all over the place with no focus or structure. It will waste a lot of time in editing and refining. 

Tracy