Get to know your toolbars.

If you’re a writer and haven’t done this, you should: Go through all the Toolbars in your computer and learn about the ones that might come in handy. It’ll take a few minutes, but it’s worth it in the long run because there are things in there you may not be aware of that can save you lots of time, hassles and steps later on. For example:

Clipboard. One of my favorite tools, Office Clipboard (under Edit in Word) will hold up to 24 chunks of copy that you can then move individually – or altogether – wherever you want them. So let’s say you’re working on a long story with lots of quotes and you want to change the quotes around, moving one to the front, one to the end, a couple into the middle, etc. You just copy and paste each chunk into Clipboard and it’ll hold it for you till you tell it where to put it. Then position your cursor in the right spot and click on the box holding that chunk of copy, and in it goes. Or if you want to move the entire batch, click on “Paste All” and it’ll dump in all the chunks at once.

Clipboard is great when you want to move items around on a list, too. It also works between documents, so you can move items from one to the other. When you do go from one doc to another, Clipboard may hide, but the icon will be in the lower right hand corner, sitting quietly like a faithful servant, waiting for you to bring it back to life and put it to work.

One word of caution: Be careful that you don’t hit “Clear Clipboard” by mistake because it erases everything in there and you have to start the process all over again. (That’s why I always use "copy" instead of “cut” so if I ever do that, I won’t lose anything.)

Customizing your toolbar menu is another good idea. For example, I have the "Insert" icon on my menu board, which saves me tons of time. Instead of having to click on the “Insert" button and scrolling down to "File" every time I want to insert a file someplace, which I often do, I just click on the icon and it’ll automatically ask me what file I want to put in. (Just make sure when you use it that your cursor is where you want the file to go.)

Word Count is something else I have on my menu bar and use frequently because so many of my jobs are dictated by maximum length: 500 words, 1500 words, whatever. So as I’m rolling along, I’ll click on “Word Count” every once in awhile just to see how I’m doing. Only 100 more words to go? Great! 500 words over? Dang!

I also have the “Save As” button on my menu because I use that function a lot, too. Mostly because I often work with templates and need to save files under different names every time. I also get a lot of edited documents via email and if I make the wretched mistake of hitting “Save” instead of “Save As” after making or accepting the changes, it’ll put the document into some obscure folder that I can never in a million years find again. Has that ever happened to you? It is such a pain!*

So perhaps these tips will make your life a little easier in the future. God knows you’re going need all the help you can get.

*My son-in-law John gave me a great hint for finding files like that if you do lose them that way: Go back to the original email that had the doc attached, open the document, and hit “Save As” and it’ll open the folder where it saved it originally, so you can see where it is. After that, you’re on your own because I can’t remember what you do next!

Vernacularian Slips

Writers love language, and we notice things about it that others might not. For example, see if you can pick out a pattern here:

My husband called someone to tell him about a friend who had died and said, “I just wanted to pass on some information to you…”

We were discussing radio stations and somebody said, “I am so out of tune with what’s going on with music right now…”

A guy was talking about accidentally getting locked out of a basketball game and said, “I was outside bouncing around trying to keep warm.”

A friend was having some problems with a root canal and I said, “Oh, man, what a bite…”

A woman explaining her bad mood said she had PMS and just wanted to “go with the flow…”

We were talking about what kind of phones to order and somebody said, “Well, let’s not get hung up on it.”

A hospital spokesman was asked about a press release for their new maternity wing and said, “It’s a little too premature to announce anything…”

Get the drift?

Death…pass on
Music…In tune
Basketball…bounce
Teeth…bite
PMS…flow
Phone…hung up
Pregnancy…premature

It’s all about people unconsciously slipping into the vernacular of whatever it is they’re talking about. So I call them “Vernacularian Slips.” Not quite the same thing as a pun, they’re a little like Freudian slips, only their name is much more difficult to pronounce.

Now that you know about Vernacularian Slips, you’ll hear them all over the place. In fact, I was just telling somebody about it recently, and the very next day he e-mailed me one he’d heard while having lunch with a friend: “The guy said, ‘This sandwich just doesn’t cut the mustard…’”

See what I mean?

Reading & Writing

I don’t know too many writers who are not big readers. Well, I do know one, Bill H., one of my favorite Writers’ Group members. But then, Bill just had a letter published in the NY Times Book Review, so maybe he reads more than he admits.

Myself, I read mostly non-fiction – biographies, memoirs, travel, etc. – almost all of which come from the library. I did, however, recently buy “The Orchid Thief” after a very funny presentation Susan Orlean gave about it at our local botanic garden. I went to see her because I loved the movie “Adaptation” and was curious about her. Could she possibly have done all those things Meryl Streep did in that movie?? (Answer: No.)

After reading “The Orchid Thief,” I wanted more of Susan Orlean, so I went to the library and found a travel book she’d written. I also got a book called, “Assembling My Father,” by a young Jewish woman (Anna something Oliver) who’d been raised as a fundamentalist Christian in New Mexico by her former NY intellectual mother after her father committed suicide at age 35. It was excellent! And, get this: As I was reading her Forward and seeing all the people she thanked, guess who one of them was: Susan Orlean! Isn’t that a weird coincidence?! Those were the only two books I got out of the library that night.

I find that one book often opens the door to others. In fact, I went through the entire Algonquin Round Table (a group of smart, witty ‘20s writers) reading one biography after another because I’d hear all these wonderful stories about these interesting characters and wanted to learn more about them: Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, George S. Kaufman, the Marx brothers, etc. It opened up a whole new world of literature to me, and some of the funniest lines ever written. (My husband’s favorite Dorothy Parker poem: “Martinis, martinis, the drink I love the most. One, I’m under the table, two, I’m under the host.”)

Reading has not only introduced me to great people and great writing, it’s taken me all over the globe – I’ve sailed the Atlantic with Wm. F. Buckley, rounded Cape Horn with a father and son, kayaked down the Amazon with two modern-day adventurers, gotten lost in the Alaskan wilderness, climbed mountains, made daring escapes with Chinese slaves, and laughed my head off exploring various continents with Bill Bryson.

I just finished reading Gene Wilder’s biography and that was fun, too. I had no idea he was the one who wrote “Young Frankenstein;” I always thought it was Mel Brooks.

I also love reading what famous writers have to say about writing – Stephen King’s book on it is great – a quick but fact-packed read. I’d quote from it here, but I lent it to someone and never got it back. In fact, I think it was Bill’s brother, Dick, who IS a big reader, but apparently, not a big returner.

Speaking again of Bill and books, his friend, Bob Tarte, wrote a book called, “Enslaved by Ducks” in 2004, a very humorous life experience romp, which gained some notoriety regionally and Patricia Heaton (“Everybody Loved Raymond”) is even talking to him about purchasing the rights for a TV series.

Anyway, my point in all this is just to say, If you want to be a writer, you really oughta start reading. And keep track of the books you read. That’s something I should have done but didn’t and now regret it.

Proofing - aarrrgggghhhhh.

The worst thing just happened to me: I got an email from one of my best clients telling me there was a typo in the first paragraph of the newsletter pdf I'd sent him. It hadn't gone to print yet, THANK GOD, but, still, it's so bad when that happens. And he didn't find it, his BOSS did. And to make it even more awful, the typo was in the sentence: "Our focus is always on quality." The IS was missing! Ohmygod, can you imagine? I want to die when that stuff happens.

And this wasn't the first time it's happened with this client. Which kills me because I love doing their newsletter. It's a business-to-business pub, and it's really important that everything be perfect because they truly are a quality-focused company. They do contract manufacturing for some of the biggest and best corporations in the U.S. so everything has to be right.

Like many writers, I am terrible at proofing. In this case, I offered to deduct an hour of my time and to find a proofreader for the future newsletters. But is that enough? No. Because what if the newsletter had gone out with that mistake and one of their current or prospective customers saw it and said, "They focus on quality? Well, then how the hell did they screw up here?"

I hope this isn't an indication of what the rest of my day is going to be like.

The Playboy story.

On St. Patrick’s Day, 1972, my then-husband, Tim and I were standing in the Frolic Bar celebrating with a bunch of people when a friend of ours, Nancy Muir, came up to me and said, "Keasha, I saw your letter in Playboy! That was so cool!" And I thought, "What?? What letter?" I had completely forgotten that I written them a letter in December about an interview they ran with Germaine Greer, a leading British feminist, who was notoriously outspoken. Tim turned to me and said, "Wasn't there something kind of negative about me in that letter?" I thought, "Uh-oh. What did I say in that letter?"

We both took off in separate directions to find a drug store and buy the magazine.

What the letter said was this:

“Because of her foul mouth, my husband immediate classified Germaine Greer as another he-woman and refused to read your excellent interview. Hopefully, his negative reaction was not typical, but I have the feeling it may have been. Miss Greer’s philosophy was pragmatic and her ideals were certainly feasible, but because of her unabridged vocabulary, I probably won’t be the only one trying to convince a stubborn male that she’s not out to castrate him. And I’ve got a long way to go, baby.”

(Note: for those too young to remember, that last line was a play on “You’ve come a long way, baby…” which originated with a cigarette campaign (!) and caught on during the feminist movement of the ‘70s.)

The reason I always refer to this incident as “the beginning of the end of my marriage” (see “How I got into Writing”) was that it was kind of an awakening for me about the differences between Tim and me. It took another seven years, but eventually, we did get divorced.

The other thing that letter did for me was reinforce the idea in my head that maybe I could write. (If Playboy published my letter, I must be good!) So it definitely played an important role in my becoming a writer. And, obviously, other parts of my life as well.