Letters From New Zealand

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...