February 2018 – Holistic Wellness Writers

The Order of Things. . .

I write every day–something, each day. Recently, I was composing a resource document in Google Docs–for my wellness offerings–rather than my usual

habit of writing in MS Word for Mac. I’m playing more with Google Docs and Sheets to learn more about them.

Anyway–While writing, I saw a button in the bottom right-hand corner of the document screen, “Explore.” “Ooo, I’m an explorer at heart, Ok.” I clicked on the Explore button.

It brought up a sidebar with images–which I could use in the document if I wanted (& I did choose one, as seen here). Above the three offered photos, it contained headings of “Topics.” It had pulled three topics from an overall look at the contents of my document. It listed, in this order:
Quality time
Spirit
Wellness.

I found this interesting, as my mention of “quality time” came much later in the piece than Source or Spirit–AND “Source” and “Spirit” are more prevalent on the page.

What If. . .

It got me wondering–Is this a reflection of our society and its priorities? Is it a reflection of “time” in any form, coming before or outranking “Spirit,” even when I had put it first? Continue reading

Hello again. Thanks for visiting.
I know–not a sexy title for a blog post, but I’ll bet you’re curious!

Writing is the Fun Part, But Then. . .
I see it all the time. People coming up with ideas, writing their hearts out–composing an article or a book, or another writing project. But then they start looking back at it. Things are. . . not matched up. “How did this header end up so big, while that looks like–is that a different. . . Font? Holy smokes!” Eeeks!

Then there’s this “little matter” of organizing all that Table of Contents stuff, getting it lined up, and. . . Oh, cr@p! The page numbers? Do the page numbers match the real contents? And what if you have to cut or add a paragraph or two? Or a page, or two? Then what? How the hell do you. . . realign. . . (muffled shriek)

Normally, I see writers “fix” these things manually with hard returns, extra spaces, tabs, and other nightmarish extraneous-coding hidden elements. If you only knew about all the extra hidden coding which gets inserted into documents because of hard returns and tabbing-over. Oh, my word! What a mess these actions make of your manuscript, and they have to be fixed before it can be submitted for printing. But I digress. extraneous hidden coding is a subject for another post.

The crazy uneven font sizes and styles, random bold or italics, and the hit or miss occasionally-centered heading here, and other left-justified headings over there. The sometimes bolded, sometimes not sub-heads are all only a few of the issues writers unknowingly stumble into and editors encounter. Have you ever had to rearrange your order of chapters? O.M.G.! It can be a headache to resolve.

How can you avoid these kinds of frustration? Or wait–Are we all doomed to hours of weeding through this part of the editing phase and just. . . figuring it out? Hint: I have a secret weapon I use to simplify this stuff. . . and I’ll share in a couple of minutes. Continue reading “Secret Formatting Tool Helps Keep Your Writing Looking Sharp!”