I recently finished watching the Netflix miniseries The Fall of the House of Usher and thoroughly enjoyed it. It had everything I like in my horror: a dollop of creepiness, a dash of humor, and a high body count and gore quotient (also Mark Hamill as an evil lawyer).

While there’s a lot to discuss about Fall of the House of Usher—I may do a future blog post on the panoply of Poe references if the spirit so moves me—the thing that most impressed me was how well it pulled off two simultaneous and complementary tropes, what I’ll call “inevitable demise” and “cruel and unusual death.”

These are often found side-by-side in horror movies. Most frequently, at least in my experience, they show up in slasher films, usually ones that are either intentionally campy or are just plain not that good. This isn’t coincidence. These tropes are difficult to pull off with any kind of storytelling grace. When paired, they tend to end up in narratives where subtlety and depth weren’t ever on the menu.

If you look at the dates on the posts here, you’ll notice a bit of a gap: I took the last couple of weeks off while I was on a trip to Oaxaca, Mexico. Normally I still do things like post blogs and whatnot when I travel, and I did still do a bit of work and a few other creative career type things during the trip. Unlike my usual working-on-the-road excursions, though, I wanted this trip to feel a smidge more like an actual vacation.

I struggle to take breaks as a rule, largely because I genuinely like to work. Having literally nothing to do is not my idea of a good time—I can handle it for a day or so, but more than that and I start to get antsy. This is a good thing for a freelancer most of the time, but it also makes me prone to epic burnout if I’m not careful about keeping my life in balance.

I’m a big fan of workshopping, and I’ve talked a few times in the past about how important it is for writers (especially fairly young or new writers) to get outside eyes and opinions on their work. I also find the other side of that equation—providing creative feedback to other people—to be a valuable exercise, giving you a chance to identify what you find works and doesn’t in other people’s writing so you can apply those lessons to your own writing.

That said, I also know that both giving and receiving creative feedback can be an intimidating prospect for those who haven’t done so before. So I thought it would be helpful to share some tips, based on my 10+ years of participating in workshop groups.

Editing a literary journal gives me a unique insight into the publisher’s side of the process. Even so, though, that’s just one journal, and while I’ve read for a few others in the past, I also know that each market has its own unique process for reviewing submissions and deciding what to publish.

Luckily, a lot of publishers are also very open and transparent about what they want to see from submitters. One great place to find this info is using Duotrope’s Editor Interviews. For anyone who’s not familiar with Duotrope, it’s a searchable listing of presses, journals, magazines, contests, and other places publish creative work, and is a handy tool for figuring out where to send stories and poems.

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.