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

“My territory when first joining the company included the West Coast in the South Island, and Gisborne in the North. We—the passengers—thought the advent of the DC3 onto these routes was a major leap in technology. They were so much larger than the models in use up until the work-horse from W.W.II became available. The DC3 did however have one major drawback in that not being pressurised, they were unable—because of oxygen requirements—to climb above the worst of the weather. They also were routed rather like a suburban bus, in that they stopped at Palmerston North and Napier on the way north, and Blenheim, Westport and Hokitika going south. This latter route wasn’t too bad, but the northern trip meant travelling through the Manawatu Gorge which is very subject to weather, and the continual up and down movement was—or must be—like tracking with ground contour radar. Buffeted by the winds that whipped through the opening in the ranges, luggage was tossed out of the racks overhead,

Going through Dad's letters reminded me of a number of things; like the fact that though Dad has written to me every week, my letter writing was sporadic. I may not have written many letters, but I was very casual about using the phone to call home to New Zealand. It was expensive, but even in the mid 80's long distance calls were a lot cheaper than they had once been. Maybe it's a generational thing, and we approach technologies not as they are, but how they were when we were first introduced to them. My grandmother, particularly, found long distance calls a little discombobulating. One time I was baking a cake and the recipe said “cook until done.” I had no idea what that meant, so I tried calling my mother and, after getting no answer, called my Grandmother, who was quite amazed that I’d called all the way from Australia to find out how to bake a cake! May 1992 - Grandma said you’d rung, but apart from the fact that she was thrilled with the call and the news,

Reading back through thirty years of letters, it's perhaps not surprising that some of the events in the letters are now long forgotten by the participants. My sister agreed to proof read the book, so I sent her a text file and over the course of a few weeks she would text me little notes on errors or spelling mistakes. Then one day I got the following text: I have no recollection of the birthday party. Do you think he made stuff up??? I wasn't sure which birthday party she was referring to, but after asking for clarification, I found the story she was talking about: Monday was Grandma’s birthday and she was thrilled with your call and the flowers. Your aunt Barb was up from Christchurch and cousin Becky arrived on the way back from a week in Auckland so I took them all to Otto’s (at the Overseas Terminal) for a meal. Had a lovely meal with a great highlight; Mum had, as usual, baked a cake and arranged for the restaurant to have it served. They brought it in with all

When I started transcribing the letters that Dad had sent me, I saved them as separate Microsoft Word files. After a few months I had quite a large number of letters transcribed, and I started putting them into separate folders—a folder for each year. I also experimented with putting them into a single Word file for each year, as a first attempt at organization. This didn’t go well; primarily because I'd only transcribed a small portion of the letters, and going back and inserting new letters into the documents proved tedious. Separate to the letters project, I had bought the text editor Scrivener . Scrivener is an interesting application, very different to Word. One of the things I like about it is that you can split the parts of your project into sections within your master document. These sections sort of look like individual documents, and they can then be re-ordered by clicking and dragging them, which makes reorganizing long documents much easier.  One day it occur

An American reader wrote to ask how my father pronounced ‘NZ,’ an abbreviation he often uses for New Zealand. Is it pronounced EnZee or EnZed they asked? Growing up in New Zealand I was aware that American’s pronounce their Z as Zee, and not Zed, the way we do in New Zealand. Oddly enough, when I came here, I don’t remember being particularly struck by the way American’s pronounced the letter; perhaps because it isn’t really something that comes up in conversation. In fact, unless you watch a lot of Sesame Street , you could miss it all together. So when putting together Letters From New Zealand , it didn’t even occur to me to add any explanation—one way or the other—about the pronunciation of the abbreviation for the country. But to answer the question, yes, ‘NZ’ when referring to New Zealand, is pronounced EnZed. Or at least it is by us Kiwi’s. Amazon:  Letters From New Zealand: Farming, Fishing and Golf