Not long ago, Terrence Gargiulo complimented me on all the care I put into sleuthing out items for A Storied Career.

My dirty little secret is that it’s not difficult at all to find material. I never cease to be astonished at all the material that continues to emerge on storytelling and all the fascinating ways people deploy stories. I find material every single day. I print out material from the Web sites I come across with storytelling content.

When I have a critical mass of material, I perform an initial triage. I pull out items that get my heart palpitating and that I know I want to blog about right away. The rest I put into a pile for further contemplation.

I would love to be a full-time blogger and do nothing but work on this blog (and, to a lesser extent, the three other blogs I maintain). At the beginning of 2008, my goal was to really establish myself as a blogger and blog every single day, a goal I think I have attained. But I also have to pay the bills, so instead of spending all my time blogging, most of my working hours (and I have very long working hours) are dedicated to my work as associate publisher and creative director of Quintessential Careers. I also usually have a book or other freelance project going. And I have volunteer work as a board member of the Career Management Alliance, and currently (briefly) with a political campaign. Then there’s bicycling and relaxing with some pop culture (TV, movies, books). And very occasionally, housework.

Yes, I get a tiny bit of revenue from the Google ads here on A Storied Career — and I do mean tiny. Last time I checked, I made about 39 cents in a given month. The point is, I don’t have as much time as I’d like for this blog because of that nagging need to make a living. And all of this is a roundabout way of explaining that I don’t have many opportunities to return to that big stack of potential material for A Storied Career. When do, I again sift through the pile and pull out anything I want to write about immediately. I give the rest a more careful read than I did during the triage phase, and often highlight and annotate. Then I file material in folders that roughly correlate with the categories in A Storied Career. (I have a theory that all storytelling can be classified into just three categories, but having many categories is probably better for Search Engine Optimization).

I also have two huge folders — for items that need further investigation (revisiting the original Web site whence came the item to glean more information on why I was attracted to that Web site/blog in the first place) and for items that need further conceptualization (I know I want to blog about them, but I need to put more thought into what I want to say).

I find actual blogging incredibly time-consuming — inserting links and in many cases, finding appropriate graphics to accompany entries. I try to have about a month’s worth of future blog entries queued up. Currently, I have only about two entries ready to go, excluding the Q&As that are queued up through late December. I feel compelled to run an additional entry on most days I’m running a Q&A for those who might not be interested in the Q&A. I am, of course, flexible, with my future queued-up entries so I can push them back if I find something more immediate to blog about.

As I’ve mentioned before, though, I dislike blogging about the same thing everyone else is blogging about, no matter how timely and newsworthy. That approach is probably not in the true spirit of blogging but is just one of my quirks.

Bloggers, what’s your process?