For roughly 20 years, the closest I've come to actively practicing religion is crossing myself with holy water when I go into Catholic churches. But I’m fascinated by religion as a concept, even though I don’t believe in one personally, and I find it to be a particularly interesting and useful tool to employ in speculative fiction. The beliefs, rituals, symbolism, history, terminology, and traditions that come along with a religion can be very helpful in clearly establishing a culture within an invented setting, and giving that place a sense of history.

If you're looking for examples, the first one that always comes to my mind is Dune, where the beliefs of both the Fremen and the broader galaxy aren't just window-dressing setting details but are critical for the development of the plot. The Actual Star by Monica Byrne is another one where the religion is woven in, and it also uses a long timeview that explores how traditions and beliefs shift over thousands of years, which makes it a particularly fun read for folks with an interest in mythology. On the fantasy side, Ann Leckie's The Raven Tower and Kerstin Hall's Star Eater are two I've read in recent years that employ religion and mythology in a very interesting and effective way. In the horror realm, V. Castro's Goddess of Filth twists real-world religions into new speculative plot threads.

After Happy Hour is currently in the middle of its reading period for the winter issue, which means that I've been reading a lot of short stories lately. I look for a lot of different things when I'm reviewing stories for the issue and trying to decide which ones we should publish, from rounded characters to an interesting voice to a logical plot that I haven't seen a thousand times before. One thing that I've noticed consistently across genres, though, is that the author's command of descriptive language usually directly correlates to the strength of the piece overall. 

Descriptions in fiction do more than just help the reader picture what's happening on the page. What characters notice about their world, and how they talk about it, gives us a lot of insight into their worldview. Writers can also use descriptions to teach the reader what's important about the place, time period, or culture that the story inhabits, and to direct their attention to key details of the setting that impact the plot or how characters behave (or to set up misdirections or red herrings that lead to nice moments of surprise later in the piece). The strongest stories we get at After Happy Hour recognize this multi-faceted potential of the seemingly humble description, and that's consistently true whether the piece is literary or hard sci-fi or anything in between. 

Cozy fiction is having a moment in the speculative world. It started with cozy fantasy, which has been growing in popularity for the last few years, but has now spread into the adjacent genres of sci-fi and even horror, and the publishers looking for cozy fiction have been popping up like toadstools since 2020. 

For some context, the term “cozy” is borrowed from cozy mysteries. While the style the term describes has its roots in the 1920s, the term wasn't coined until the 1980s. It describes a mystery that focuses on solving a crime rather than the dark, gritty details. There are other typical tropes of the genre, like that they often have an amateur detective as the protagonist and typically take place in an isolated or secluded location, but the pertinent detail that earned the nickname “cozy” is that the stakes and the violence and both relatively low. The initial crime can be a murder, but it usually happens off-screen and to someone that neither the reader nor the protagonist care about too deeply. 

The Q are one of my favorite Star Trek civilizations—specifically, as they're presented in Voyager. Don't get me wrong, I love the Q episodes in Next Generation and DS9, too, but in my opinion Voyager is where they get really interesting. For any non-Trekkies out there, the Q are god-like extra-dimensional beings capable of altering reality on a whim. They are immortal and have seemingly complete control over time and space. Despite this extensive power, they take an interest in humans during Picard's term at the helm of the Enterprise—or one Q in particular, played by John de Lancie, who pops up now and then to pester his pet humans. We learn a bit about the culture of the Q Continuum in the course of these interactions, but the focus mostly stays on the impact Q's actions have on the Enterprise, and is less about the Q themselves. 

In Voyager, we learn more about why an all-powerful being like the Q would take an interest in puny humans in the first place. In the episode “Death Wish”, a renegade Q comes to Captain Janeway seeking asylum. He wants to leave the Continuum and become human so that he can die. Being immortal, he feels, has made the Q go stagnant. The viewer gets a tour of the Continuum rendered in a format our inferior human minds can understand: a highway through the desert, next to which stands a run-down house where bored-looking people are lounging around, some reading, some playing games. No one is talking; the Q seeking asylum explains that they've run out of things to talk about. Everything has already been said, and all the Q have already seen all there is to see in the universe. The Q feels his life has become futile. He finds it intolerable to keep on living, but he can't stop. 

When I'm reading through submissions for After Happy Hour, I see a lot of submitters making the same kinds of mistakes. Across genres, the most consistent one that is likely to get a submission rejected is, broadly, sending work before it's ready. This can mean a lot of different things, but there are some definite trends that I see over and over in the creative nonfiction submissions where I finish reading and think, “This is going to be a great essay—once it's actually finished.“ 

There's a lot of advice out there for writing short fiction, and much of it applies to narrative nonfiction, too. But writers of short nonfiction are pulling from a different substrate. Fiction writers can get inspiration from the real world, but they're not beholden to it. If something doesn't quite fit, they can change it. Nonfiction writers don't have that luxury. Where fiction writers invent, nonfiction writers curate, deciding which moments and details from reality will best tell the story they want to tell. That difference is the root of a lot of the unique issues I see in personal essays. 

Tropes get a bad rap—and it's not entirely unearned. When they're over-used, or used incorrectly, then they can make a story feel predictable and cliche, stealing the potential for surprise and discovery that pulls readers into a story and makes them eager to get to the end. Tropes can also end up being crutches for writers, preventing them from reaching for more imaginative and distinctive ideas. When archetypes are used in place of fully developed characters, those people in the story feel flat, lacking in the depth, personality, and realistic flaws that make a character feel like a real person the reader can relate to. There are also some tropes that perpetuate stereotypes when they're used uncritically. This can happen even when the trope or archetype isn't overtly negative—having a old, wise Asian sensei, for instance, both feels derivative and dehumanizes the character, reducing them to one-dimensional traits based on their demographic identity rather than allowing them to be unique, fully realized individuals. 

But while they have a lot of potential pitfalls, tropes aren't inherently bad. They're a tool in the writer's toolbox and, like any tool, whether they're effective depends on how you use them. Especially for writers in genres like romance, cozy mystery, fairy tales, or space opera, readers expect to see certain tropes employed in a story, and if they're not present at all that can leave those readers disappointed. Some genres are defined by their tropes and a story doesn't really qualify for that label unless it includes certain conventions. For something to qualify as “bad boy romance”, for example, it needs to have an innocent and rule-abiding protagonist, a rebellious and edgy love interest, and an ending where they're together and live HEA: happy ever after (or are at least HFN: happy for now).

Pittsburgh is a sports town. Especially when things are going well for the local teams, the rhythm of their seasons directly affects the pace of life in the city. I follow the local teams more closely some seasons than others, but I like that, even when I'm not actively keeping up with them, I know how they're doing by a kind of osmosis just from existing here. 

And that's one of the things that's fun about sports, I think—it creates this collective experience that connects people across an entire region, a shared touchstone of identity that unites across other dividing lines. That also makes it useful for storytellers. It can be a setting to bring two disparate people together, or a telling detail that automatically anchors the reader in a specific place. 

I shifted some poetry chapbooks to the top of my TBR stack in honor of National Poetry Month, and I've been enjoying the change in pace. I always try to read a mix of novels and short story collections, but my usual reading is definitely very fiction heavy, and it's fairly rare for any nonfiction or poetry to slip into the mix. This is, in part, because I'm often not just reading for enjoyment. That's part of why I read, but I also see every book as an opportunity to learn—to see what kinds of stories other people are telling, or to pick up tricks of the trade, or get ideas for how to do things better in my own stories. 

What I need to remember, though, is that fiction writers can also learn a lot from reading outside their genre. I've been aiming to keep the same craft-focused mindset when I'm reading poetry chapbooks, and I think I’ve picked up some useful tidbits. So, of course, figured I’d come share them with yinz.

I'm leading an online workshop next month that's all about writing effective hooks, so I've been spending a lot of time lately closely reading different story openings to figure out what gives them that “I have to keep reading this” vibe. This process has confirmed one thing that I already knew: there's no one right way to pull readers into a story, but each story does usually have a style of hook that works best for it. 

These don't necessarily break down along genre lines. There are definitely some common pairings—starting with an intense action scene is more common in say, sci-fi or thriller stories than it is in literary or romance. But there's no reason a romance can't start with a car chase, if that makes sense with the rest of the narrative, just like a sci-fi story can be just as effective if it has an emotional hook, or opens on a mystery. 

I try to leave the country once a year or so, and I'm currently in the process of getting in my trip for 2026. I started this post on the plane, continued it on the Tren Maya, and finished it in warm and beautiful Valladolid, Mexico, far from the snow-covered and frozen city of Pittsburgh. As excited as I am to warm up a bit, that's not the primary reason I travel. A lot of my best story ideas have come from visiting new places and experiencing life in a different part of the world. It's also a solid way to break up my routine, which I know I could technically do in Pittsburgh, too, but I'm very bad at veering away from my usual habits when I'm going about my day-to-day life. Jumping on a plane and heading to Mexico or Guatemala—or even just riding the train to Buffalo or Baltimore—is a foolproof way to ease myself out of any ruts I've gotten into. 

I will say, the way that I approach these trips isn't quite the way I think most would go into a vacation. For one thing, I usually don't completely take off work—I tend to drop down to more of a part-time workload, but continuing to work lets me take the kind of longer trips that allow me really sink into a new place. Especially when there's train travel involved, like on this trip, I view those periods as little mini writing retreats, because that environment is one where I find it very easy to get ideas flowing: you're stuck in one place without much to distract you, but there's also something new to see every time you look out the window in need of inspiration. 

But I also think I approach travel with a different mindset than the average non-writer would, and that's something you can do regardless of your employment situation or how long you're traveling. When you look at things the right way, you can find stories and inspiration that you can use to fuel your creativity for long after you're back on familiar turf. This post is both advice for other writers and a reminder to myself as I get ready to see some new places on how to make the most of my time while I wander.