From Joanna: Every book I’ve written has been a journey with its own peaks and valleys. The joy of creating The Best of British Scrapbooking and Cardmaking, and the great response it has had as the first international book on scrapbooking, is somewhat diminished by the death of one of our winners, Sarah Wheatley, a few weeks before publication. Sarah lost her battle with breast cancer right as the book was going to press. Her husband, Steve, emailed me and told me that he was afraid Sarah wouldn't get to see the final product. So, I sent my proofing copy to their home via Fed Ex. There must have been an angel guiding the package. The book arrived on a Wednesday instead of the projected Thursday. Sarah spent a long while looking at it. One of her life goals was to see her work in print. She slept the entire next day and died a few days after in her husband's arms. Steve thanked me publicly on the UKScrappers website for getting the proofing copy to his wife and admonished all of us scrappers. He noted that since Sarah was the scrapbooker in the family, she had focused most of her efforts on pages about the family. He wished she would have left more pages about herself and called upon all of us to include ourselves in our pages, something I’ve advocated since I wrote an article called Leaving a Legacy for the February 2000 issue of Creating Keepsakes.

Here’s the challenge: Create your own legacy pages, pages that are expressly designed for us to "leave behind." You know, direct marketing wizards tell us that the P.S. is the most highly read portion of any letter, so our P.S. pages should be those highly readable pages where we talk about our lives in retrospect, our goals for our families, our reasons for our life choices, our triumphs and disappointments.

Here are some journaling starters, sentence stems, to get you going:

• The smartest move I've ever made…

• The toughest battle I ever fought…

• The one thing I wish I'd done differently…

• A risk I took and how it came out…

• A decision I made that had an impact on my entire life…

• A wish I'd make for you…

• And other ideas are on my website, www.scrapbookstorytelling.com

All pages submitted by October 29, 2005 will be posted in a special layout gallery here on About Scrapbooking. Everyone who takes the time to enter this challenge will have created a memorable keepsake for her family album. From the entries, three pages that especially capture the essence of the challenge will be chosen as winners. If we choose your page, I’ll send you a signed copy of The Best of British Scrapbooking and Cardmaking!

To submit a page, email a .jpg file of the scan or digital photo of your page to Rebecca (email: scrapbooking.guide@about.com ) by October 29, 2005. For tips on taking digital photos of your pages for online submissions click here.

Find more journaling inspiration from Joanna by clicking here.