The past few weeks have been crazy ones. That is probably evident from my erratic podcast publishing schedule. Life has a way of dousing our good intentions and ripping apart our best-laid plans. I am working on getting on a regular schedule in which I upload a new story each week by Thursday or Friday. With this week’s story, “The Reluctant Dragon” I believe I am all caught up.

You’d be surprised how much work goes into creating each of these podcasts. I spend hours looking for the right stories. Next comes a full read through. At this stage, many tales are tossed either because I didn’t find them as entertaining as I hoped or there was something inherently wrong with the story.

For example, many stories have horribly racist undertones that cannot be edited out without compromising the story. Mild racism was sadly inherent in the era, so it cannot always be avoided entirely (although I strive to tone it down). Other times I find that I just cannot read the words as they are written convincingly enough. This often happens when a story is written in a difficult dialect.

Once a story passes the read through phase, I write a brief introduction and conclusion. I then sit down in my studio and start recording. Recording is never a simple, straight-forward process. I am continually self-directing my read, modifying the delivery, fixing stumbles, correcting character voices, and more. Typically it takes about 5 minutes to record one minute of finished podcast.

With a rough read “in the can,” I spend an hour or so perusing my royalty-free music library to find the best music for the piece. Then, I seek out royalty-free or public domain images and create each episode’s artwork.

With all of the audio recorded and uploaded to Dropbox, it’s time to edit. When I do it myself, it takes several hours. So, I decided to hire someone to do it for me. If I had to self-edit, I would have stopped doing these podcasts months ago.

My final step is bringing all of the pieces – the written, the audio, and the visual – together and upload them to my podcast host for distribution and add everything to Litreading.com and you start listening.