Very important heading here

Several weeks ago, I spent several hours on the same piece. Not writing it. Not editing it. Posting it.

Over and over.

Some of it technical problems.

1. Hitting the backspace key at the wrong moment, making the browser reload the last page, and losing all of my work.
2. Formatting issues with the newsletter software.
3. I totally forgot to save my work. Ugh!

The main reason it took so long is that I’ve taken to writing visually. With lots of bold and italics (and both). 

My process went like this: I wrote my draft in LibreOffice, then copy-and-pasted it into a post on the church website. Then I did the same in the church newsletter.

Certainly none of this sounds like a problem except for this: the underlying formatting. Using any kind of Office-like product keeps the underlying formatting when you cut and paste. Which is great for all of those italics and bolds. Not so great if you don’t want the rest of the junk behind it.

The technical glitches exposed the problem. Whether I pasted it with formatting or without, I was left wasting a lot of time. I would either clean up the junk behind the formatting I wanted to keep, or had to go and put in all those visual formatting marks I had in the original text.

And, to be honest, I was writing in a publishing program so that I could save the document for later. I’ve used several different methods of composing a post, and this seemed to make the most sense.

So the day I spent recreating the same damn post something like 7 times (seriously), it dawned on me that maybe the problem isn’t really the device or the system. Maybe the real problem is that I don’t really need to write visually. Shoot! I did it again!

I think of my friend Lydia, who, back in the late 90’s mocked the idea of using italics or bold for emphasis. The writing should stand on its own. Then I get all those voices in my head about how visual we are and I can’t help it. My fingers flip to the Ctrl button and I just can’t ctrl myself! So satisfying!

So that day, I resolved to reduce the need to use italics or bold (or both). I don’t need it. It’s pretty silly, anyway. I was going to ween my over-reliance on these tricks.

Until I started using Google Docs in earnest.

Oh Google! How you do this to me!

I can write in Google Docs, bold and italicize, even pick out headers and it all slips into WordPress without background formatting problems. And I get to save a copy automatically. So simple. So easy.

My bold and slanty friends, perhaps I was too hasty. Perhaps we can still be friends.

No hard feelings, right?