Barbara Casey
INSPIRATIONAL WRITER AND ZAZZLE DESIGNER
My name is Barbara Casey. In June 2015, I turned 70 (next milestone birthday is June of 2025). I didn’t want to be an “elderly” seventy-year-old, so I’ve been challenging myself over the years to keep up with new trends, thought-provoking ideas and broader perspectives.
I’ve documented some of this in my review of Chris Guillebeau’s book The Happiness of Pursuit.
Over the past thirty years, I’ve been a tutorial writer with 3 Kindle books and many online how-to articles. Since 2001, I’ve curated and written resources for spiritual entrepreneurs – on Squidoo, HubPages and multiple blogs. Between 1995 and 2002 I published 5 editions of The Metaphysical and Holistic Florida Directory, wrote a marketing newsletter from 2003 to 2009 and conducted numerous teleclasses that were converted to PDF e-books.
I have two Zazzle print on demand shops to augment Social Security, but my main love is writing, reading, and reviewing really good books. So I’ve gathered all my writings from their various temporary homes and herded them back to my own site, under my own banner.
I hope you find something of value during your browsing adventures.
Cheers,
Barbara Casey
I Became The Tutorial Lady Kind of By Accident
I did not set out to have a career as The Tutorial Lady. My tutorial writing started because of a need I noticed and so I just took it upon myself to fill it… with a how-to tutorial.
It all started back in 1994, when I bought a rather early version of CorelDraw to make graphics for a holistic directory I was publishing. Included with the software was a sheet of Alt Key shortcuts. Whoa! Here was a way to make the copyright symbol, which I absolutely needed for book publishing. And there was the shortcut for bullets! And French accents! I felt like I had entered a secret room which not many people knew about… back in 1994.
I had a whole page of keyboard symbols that made life so much easier and, meanwhile, everyone else was using asterisks for bullets and apostrophes for French acute accents.
Here’s what happened next… I started making printable tutorials to sell
I went on to edit and publish 5 editions of the Metaphysical and Holistic Florida Directory between 1995 and 2002, when the internet took over as the go-to reference resource. But I hung on to the sheet of keyboard symbols that whole time.
Between the shortcuts on the CorelDraw list and more I discovered on my own, I had enough material to make a 2-page PDF list containing 300 Alt Key symbols, which I sold for 99 cents on my website. I also made a web page which included the most frequently requested Alt Key symbols. This was back in 2006.
Then I added two more tutorials: Word Flyer Design and Curing Spelling Amnesia.
More PDFs and website tutorials… and a new brand is born
In the meantime, I had acquired many clients for whom I designed flyers for their classes and workshops. I typically created the flyers in CorelDraw or Microsoft Publisher, which were pretty good desktop design tools at the time. But most folks wanted to save money and update their own workshop information by changing dates, times and places themselves. In other words, they wanted their flyers created in Microsoft Word.
So I went through every step of creating a flyer in Word 2003 and posted the instructions in great detail on my website in 2007. I eventually put this tutorial on Squidoo and added Word versions 2007 and 2010, as each new one came along. I made a PDF report for that tutorial, too. And don’t even get me started on spelling bloopers. I got so frustrated reading it’s when its was called for. Ditto for the confusion people were experiencing with your and you’re. Another tutorial was the result. See a need and fill it… that’s all I did.
It dawned on me that I should really “brand” myself, based on what I was doing and so for a few years I became “The Tutorial Lady.” I ended up with tutorials on Squidoo, HubPages, various blogs, and in 2011, Amazon Kindle books.
All of the tutorial material is now here on BarbaraCasey.com, along with my inspirational writings, business idea posts, and book and product reviews. Thanks for dropping by… I hope you find some useful tips and tools during your stay.
KINDLE TUTORIALS UPDATE:
The Word Flyer tutorial is out-of-date, but the Keyboard Symbols and Curing Spelling Amnesia Kindle books are still available on Kindle Unlimited.