I recently got back from my cross-country adventure to Yosemite and back to Pittsburgh by train. Trains and buses are my preferred method of traveling when I have the time. Planes are efficient, sure, but there’s something special about seeing the landscape go by while you’re passing through it that’s inspiring for me. The constant stream of inspiration and potential new ideas going by outside the window makes it easy for me to get my head into a creative space.

In that spirit, I thought it might be fun to write prompts based on the things that gave me ideas or piqued my interest during the trip. Here are 3 writing prompts based around travel.

I’ve been working on a few new projects lately, including many short stories for a linked collection as well as two independent novellas (or what I think will be novellas, which is maybe a discussion for a different post) and that means coming up with lots of character names. This is something of a problem for me because I’m historically quite bad at it.

Character names are one of those details that feel incredibly loaded and important and can utterly derail me from making progress on a new draft, no matter how much I tell myself I can always go back and change them later. Hell, even real humans have that option down the line, and it’s much more complicated to alter a real-world personal identity than to simply Find/Replace in a Word document.

Like most things in the world, the publishing landscape has changed dramatically since the dawn of the internet. That change has happened at an inconsistent pace, though. Some established publishers stuck by their old school print-subs-or-bust guns until the 2010s (and print subs are clinging on by their fingernails even today), while other journals have been online only since the early aughts.

This inconsistency has led to some conflicting advice for writers submitting their work. Some things that used to be must-include formatting or info is now seen as antiquated, and including it makes you come across as out of touch or ill-informed.

I went to two conferences for the first time in July. One of them has been happening for years, the Confluence Sci-Fi and Fantasy Convention. The second just started this year, the Wildcat Lit Fest at the newly-renovated Wildcat Mansion in Franklin, PA.

I took part in workshops at both events, and between those and the panels I filled up a quarter of a notebook with awesome tips and ideas to improve my writing. Here are some of the highlights that especially resonated with me (and will hopefully be useful for other folks looking for writing tips!)

Any writer who regularly sends out their work has no doubt come across a few contests along the way—and some of these don’t come cheap. The typical entry fee I see for contests is in the $10-$20 range, but I’ve seen entries as high as $50 a pop, and it’s fairly common for contests for book-length manuscripts to have entries of $25 higher.

This leads to the natural question: is it worth it? Sure, someone’s going to walk away with a pretty good payday—but that’s true of Powerball drawings, too, and no one’s ever said playing the lotto regularly is a smart financial decision.

Stories can come from the most unexpected places. Training yourself to pay attention to these small moments of inspiration can help you to find the stories that are floating around you in everyday life.

Case in point: even just your regular trip to the grocery store can be a goldmine of potential stories. Here are three prompts to help you develop that paying-attention-to-the-mundane muscle.

As a reader, you can feel the difference between a rounded and a flat character pretty quickly, even if you’re not sure why. Rounded characters are the ones you can picture having a conversation with, or walking down the street. They’re the ones with the power to make you feel—you might love or hate them, but whether you’re thrilled by their successes or infuriated with the decisions they make, the elicit real emotion when you read them on the page.

As a writer, figuring out how to create that kind of fully-realized character on the page isn’t quite so easy. But it is imperative to figure out if you want to truly immerse readers in the stories you tell…at least, most of the time. Let’s take a closer look at what makes a character three-dimensional, how to build that into your characters, and when you need to.

I’ve been part of the same writing group for some ten years or so, now, and like many things in my life, I basically stumbled into it. I was at one of my usual bars, working on the novel I was writing at the time, and ran into a friend who’d just started a novel-writing workshop group. He asked if I wanted to join and the answer was—as ancient astronaut theorists would say—a resounding yes.

Obviously, there have been some changes since, as there are in any group that goes on for that long. We started off meeting every other Tuesday and every member would submit work for each workshop session. As people finished the manuscripts they’d started off writing, we started workshopping other things—short stories, poems, CNF, even some scripts and graphic narratives—and relaxed into a less rigorous submission schedule since not everybody had new stuff ready for every session. We had some new people join, other members who moved away. Eventually, we started hanging out on the Tuesdays we didn’t meet, too, which morphed into a weekly workshop. That changed into 3 monthly meetings once we started running the After Happy Hour journal, with 1-2 Tuesdays every month now devoted to editorial discussions, issue launches, and other journal-type things.

There are always stories all around us, waiting to be told. Finding those stories is often just a matter of looking at things in new ways, taking the time to uncover the narrative within them.

That’s the goal of the exercises below: unlocking the stories that are inside objects you see and use every day. You can use them to start a new story from things in your environment, or picture the objects in your characters’ environment in a work-in-progress when you’re stuck in a story and not sure where to take it.

I have a few manuscripts I’ve been shopping around to agents and presses: A linked short story collection, a speculative micro-fiction chapbook, a 200,000-word sci-fi novel—in short, not the types of projects most publishers are look for.

This has, naturally, gotten me thinking about self-publishing. Especially since I know a good number of people who have done it successfully: My partner self-published his novel, Hungry, through Amazon; a member of my writing group released his comic book series, Theme of Thieves, with funding from Kickstarter; another workshop colleague serialized his novel on the now-defunct platform JukePop, leading to its eventual publication by Spaceboy Books as Lars Breaxface: Werewolf in Space.