It’s New Year Resolution time again—when we all look back over our past year, what we accomplished, what we didn’t, and what we want to do better our next time around the sun. From talking to the writers in my circle, it seems like establishing a more consistent, regular writing routine is a popular resolution this year.

This is one area where I have some first-hand expertise to share. I’ve always been pretty good at establishing and maintaining routines when I put my mind to it, but I fell out of my daily writing routine a few years ago when both work and life in general got hectic. One of my goals for 2024 was getting back into a regular writing habit, and I’m pleased with the new routine I’ve developed over the past year. 

Part of what has helped me to do that is finding the right tools to keep me accountable and give me a bit of extra motivation on the days I’m not quite feeling it. So I figured I’d share some of the tools I either use currently or have used successfully in the past to keep myself writing regularly.

The question of whether an MFA is worth it pops up on my various social feeds and other online outlets now and then. I’m not going to aspire to answer that question for everyone in this blog post, because I feel like that’s one of those things that doesn’t have a straight “yes or no” answer.

For me personally, earning my MFA was the first step that led me to the career and life I have today. I loved my time at Chatham, which was my first time being part of a community of writers since I studied music in undergrad. Without the degree, I don’t know that I would have had the confidence to go for a career as a writer, so while you definitely don’t need an advanced degree to make a living with words, for me it was the key that unlocked that path.

I took last week off from posting because I was on my way back from the annual AWP Conference, which this year was in Kansas City. We decided to drive since we were bringing along bunches of books to sell—and, on the plus side, we did sell bunches of them, which didn’t make the 12-hour drive any shorter but did at least make it feel worth it.

I love conferences, and the AWP conference in particular—I’ve been to most of them that have happened over the last 15 years. What I love about it being such a huge conference is that you really can tailor your experience to what you need in that moment, and that plus the moving location gives each year’s a slightly different feel.

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.

Mythology and folklore can be an excellent source of storytelling inspiration. In the past, it could be tricky to track down info on myths outside what I’ll call the Big 4 (Greek, Roman, Egyptian and Norse). Even for these well-known pantheons, a lot of the available info was over-simplified, or filtered through the view of writers who misconstrued (or sometimes straight-up rewrote) the original story.

Today, scholars, folklorists, and mythologists from around the world can share their knowledge without going through an academic gatekeeper. The result is a wealth of information about mythologies, pantheons, rituals, and folk tales, both ancient and active. While the internet is still shockingly incomplete in some areas, there are tons of resources available for writers seeking inspiration from myths and folk stories. Here are some of the sites I’ve found most useful for my own research.

I’m a sucker for a mailing list. Anytime I research new journals and presses to submit to, or go to a conference or bookfair, I end up subscribing to a plethora of new lists.

Of course, doing this, I’ve signed up for a bunch of newsletters that were…less than helpful. Inevitably, I’ll come to realize my inbox is getting inundated and embark on a purge. But there are newsletters I’m always excited to see pop up in my inbox, and a few I’ve come to anticipate, to the point I’ll go searching through my spam folder to double-check if I don’t see them.

Writing great stories is all well and good, but for most writers that’s just the first step. What we really want is to have other people read them, and if you’d like that audience to go beyond your friends and family, odds are that will mean sending work to journals.

The process of submitting can be intimidating and confusing when you’re first starting to send work out, but it’s not actually complicated or difficult. If you’ve never submitted work before, this step-by-step guide will tell you everything you need to know. I’ve also included some links to resources that can be helpful for newbies and experienced submitters alike.

Chapbook-length manuscripts are admittedly more common for poetry than for fiction, but that certainly doesn’t mean they’re off-limits for prose writers. This length of around 20-40 pages is ideal for collections of micro-fiction and micro-essays, as well as stand alone short stories and essays that aren’t quite big enough to be novellas (if you write things that straddle that length divide, you can check out my list of long short story and novella publishers to find more places to send them).

Since this length and style of book has been considered the domain of poets for so long, though, searching for fiction chapbook publishers can be frustrating. They’re definitely out there—it can just take creative search terms and time spent scouring press guidelines to find them.