I’ve spent quite a few years writing my blog posts. I started back in 2014 with the idea of creating posts to help promote my short novel, Floating in Space. Now, 730 posts later, I often wonder how I might have gone on had I achieved my schoolboy ambition of becoming a journalist. It’s hard enough writing a new blog post every week but what if I’d have had to have written something for a newspaper every day? That would have been a pretty tall order. Come to think of it, writing a post every week can be a bit of a challenge. Anyway this week’s post is about how I actually go about writing a blog post.
What is quite handy for me is that I haven’t restricted myself in a way other writers who belong to a particular niche have. For instance if this was a cinema blog I could only write about films, just like a book blogger can only write about books or a cycling blogger must confine himself to cycling. For me I write about anything that happens to take my fancy, although usually I stick to books, films, the occasional Formula One post and things that happen in my life.
Most of the time I’ll come up with an idea for a blog post while lying in bed. Not only that, I’ll also begin to write the blog in my head, so that when I’m fully awake I’ll have a sort of template in the back of my mind all ready to write out. Sometimes that process can go on for about a week, sometimes longer and sometimes shorter but at some point I’ll need to actually start writing. If I can’t get to my laptop I’ll sometimes jot some ideas down in my notebook.
The notes you can see in the picture here are for one of my frequent film connections posts in which I try to connect various films, actors, directors and personalities together and use those random links to tell a few cinema stories to my readers. In this one I’ve tried to connect Douglas Fairbanks to Marlon Brando.
After the note making process I’ll usually need to drink tea so I’ll drag myself up out of bed and into the kitchen where thoughts of food will begin to enter my mind. I like to start the day with a combination of various things and I’m now talking about eggs, bacon, sausages and hot buttered toast.
A good breakfast is important for a blog writer and after scoffing some food I’ll usually get down to checking my emails and scheduling the posting of numerous links to my blogs in places like Instagram, Facebook, X and so on.
After that more tea is generally a good idea and I like to leave blogging alone for a few hours and watch a little television. A good World War II documentary or a classic film noir are the sort of things I like to watch when I have time to myself in an afternoon. After a little TV entertainment I usually find that the new blog post has settled down in my head and I’m ready to start work on my laptop and get a first draft down on paper. Well not actually paper but Microsoft word. I’ll work on the post a number of times throughout the day and in fact throughout the week, then when I’ve finally got something I’m happy with, I’ll transfer it over to WordPress.
Then it’s time for another brew. I don’t think I can really stress enough the importance of a good cup of tea in the blog creation process. I drink numerous cups of tea throughout the day and it gives me a break from typing but it’s important to relax and I always think it’s quite fascinating how the post develops while I’m actually focussed on something else, reading a book or watching TV while the blog post matures a little up there in the old grey matter.
When I’m ready to once again focus on the post, I find that most of the time something new will come to me, a new idea or even just a new way of looking at the subject and then I’ll just update the post when I sit down again with my laptop.
Now that the post is on WordPress I can access it on my iPad and that little change from laptop to iPad always gives me a new perspective so I’ll refine it a little more before passing it to Liz for a quality check and final proofreading. This is the point where numerous embarrassing errors are spotted like spelling, grammar, repeated words, punctuation and so on. Then I’ll add the graphics, pictures and videos and everything is ready for my publishing deadline of 10am on Saturday.
For the graphics I mostly use a simple site like Quotescover but when I’m feeling really artistic and creative I’ll use Adobe or Canva. Sometimes I’ve even asked chat GTP or Claude to produce a graphic. I’ve not always been totally happy about those results and usually I prefer something I’ve actually worked on myself although recently I asked Claude for a new graphic for the website and it came up with this one which I think is rather good.
Not long ago I was watching the classic film Treasure of the Sierra Madre. If you haven’t seen it, it’s about a bunch of Americans prospecting for gold down in Mexico. The leader of the prospectors played by Walter Huston in the film, explains the value of gold in this way: A thousand men go searching for gold. One man finds an ounce of gold. His small find represents not only his hard work but the work of the other 999 men who were unsuccessful. Gold is worth so much because of the effort that went into finding it. Now I could argue the same point about this blog, that even though it is free to read this humble post, it’s actually worth quite a lot because of the hours, weeks and sometimes months of effort that went into preparing it, writing it, editing it, making the videos shown here and designing and producing the graphics that adorn this and all my many other posts.
Of course once the post is finished and ready for publication that isn’t the end. Next I’ll start planning where and when to publish links to the post. On a weekday I’ll publish links on all my usual social media places, Facebook, X, Instagram and so on. On a weekend I publish a post every two hours over on X and I’ve started making short videos that go out on Instagram and TikTok which have pulled in a lot of new readers and followers.
So as you read this post you now might be thinking, wow, what a great deal you’re getting! All that effort, just for you. Should you click on one of the links for Floating in Space or A Warrior of Words or Timeline and maybe buy a copy? Personally, I’d say ‘yes, you should’ but even if you don’t you can catch a new blog post every Saturday at 10 am UK time and don’t forget to have a scroll through all those previous posts too.
New post published, now I can relax. The only thing is, what shall I write about next week?
