Formatting And Editing Stories

[spark]

I write my stories in word, in part because I feel comfortable with the controls, formatting, and editing inside Word documents

However, it doesn't lend itself to the formatting in this forum. I tried to post using the paste from word, but I didn't like the full bold text- I don't like the way it looks. I tend to go through the story and manually put a line between paragraphs, which appears to be the preferred format in the stories here. I definitely prefer have the gaps between the paragraphs than having it look like one long block. I don't mind going manually putting the lines between paragraphs, because it gives me another chance edit, but it doesn't seem very efficient. Any thoughts on that?

I do wish this forum had a way to edit you're posts after actually posting- one of the forums I read does have this function and it is kind of nice when you miss something. I'm a terrible copy editor, and even when I read through something, I will always find missing words, or grammatical mistakes. And it doesn't matter how many times I read the entry, inevitably I will notice something immediately after pressing POST.

What strategies to other people use to copy-edit their work, and making the transfer from Word (or whatever) to here?

[WBDaddy]

I use OpenOffice, and the only formatting problem I run into is having to alter the font size, but only on this forum...

Of course, I double-space my paragraphs as a matter of habit when I'm typing rather than using any sort of embedded feature like that. Spillover from work habits, I guess.

[spark]

I'm sure your professional experience also helps with copy editing

[WBDaddy]

Actually, I'm a lazy sod when it comes to editing my own work. What you see on the forums is raw out of my head, usually within minutes of me completing a passage. Now, my professional experience makes it easier for me to produce a pretty clean raw product, but I despise copy editing because it's too much like, well, work...

[freswith]

I write in word, save it as a plain text document and then copy and paste it into here. I have to reformat any italics or bold, but it seems the simplest way