Bonus Post: The Process of Posting

Someone asked me via email about how I go about choosing entries for the blog, so I thought I'd write a little note explaining my thought process so you can sympathize understand what I do each time I post.

Usually, I sit down to the computer without a clear thought of what the day's quotation should be. I'll thumb through my copy of The C.S. Lewis Index, and pick a topic. Or sometimes I'll find that a particular scene from one of his books has been on my mind (like today's post about Charn) and I'll hunt down the chapter and re-read it to see if I want to quote from it. Often I'll end up reading four or five chapters, and have to remind myself that I need to get back to posting. This is usually interrupted once or twice by a) one of my cats climbing up on the desk and interposing themselves between me and the monitor, or b) one of my children in crisis because they can't find the top they want to wear to school tomorrow.

Once I've chosen my topic, typed in the quotation, and looked up the date of publication, I try to find a suitable image to go with the post. This is generally where I really run off into the weeds. I'll start with one of my favorite royalty-free stock photo sites, try a few different keywords, get side-tracked, start Googling something else, and some time later remember that I'm looking for an image to go with my post. And of course, once I find something I usually can't resist fiddling with it in Photoshop. Today's illustration was from a photo of a temple--I cropped it, took out the figure of a man in the foreground, darkened the sky, applied a bronze filter layer, then added a lens flare to mimic an "old sun". Once I'm finally happy with it, or realize that dinner is burning downstairs, I'll slam it into one of my photobucket accounts (I think I've got four of them now) and insert it into the post.

Last, I push the Publish button, then spend the next 15 minutes re-editing to take out the typo's and wondering why I always forget to do a spell-check. Post accomplished.

And you wonder why I don't get a post up here every day! :D

One last note: For those of you getting my feed via LiveJournal, I've created a new feed link, with a more descriptive name. Tell your friends! :)

LiveJournal Syndicated Feed: Daily C.S. Lewis.

Cheers, and thanks for the encouraging comments.
~Arevanye

P.S. I'm getting so used to typing Lewis's spellings, I used the British form of "sympathise". I had to go look it up on Dictionary.com because I can't trust myself to know the difference any more.