Letters From New Zealand

In a previous post I explained how I organized all the letters that made up the source of Letters From New Zealand in the program Scrivener. Once I’d assembled all of the letters into a Scrivener document, I had 1,500 individual letters and over 1,200,000 words. This document I’m saving as a record for the family, but I didn’t really think it would be of much interest to a wider audience. I’d had the idea for a book early in the project, but it was only after I’d got everything loaded in—and decided it was time to start editing—that I really devoted any thought to how I was going to organize everything. I made a copy of the master Scrivener document, and then started the process of deleting personal comments, repetitive statements, and the hundreds of ways of describing the weather! After the first pass, it became apparent that I had to get more ruthless if I was going to get down to the target; which was 120,000 words. After the third pass, I was close to the targeted le