I was asked recently if I had any writing rituals.

I would not say that I have a particularly consistent “writing ritual,” but I have certain habits that contribute to my writing. Most days, the first thing I do when I wake up in the morning is check my email and respond to anything that calls for a response, no matter whether it is personal, work, or writing-related. Next, I will usually make some coffee and try to wake up my brain with either a crossword puzzle or an online game of Scrabble.

Next, I’ll spend a few minutes attending to some Steel Toe Review or Birmingham Free Press business. That might involve posting a story to one of the STR or BFP websites, doing a little research about something, or sending out a fundraising message. Once all that is out of the way, unless I have urgent day-job work to do, I can start working on some of my own writing.

“Working on writing” might mean setting up an interview for a Birmingham Free Press article, adding to a fictional piece that I’ve already started, creating an outline, composing something for my personal blog, or any number of other things. I try to do as many of these activities as time permits every day.

Whenever I have the time, and the weather is tolerable enough, I like to take long walks with a notebook in hand. I think over whatever project I’m working on as I walk, and I occasionally stop to jot down notes. I’ve been known to spend entire days doing this. Lately, this activity has been a rare luxury. I have a treadmill at home, and I’ve tried to use this to emulate the ritual, but it isn’t the same. I get too distracted by the timer and calorie counter, and I start doing calculations in my head instead of thinking about writing.

When I’m writing at home, I like to have a dedicated beverage next to me. In the morning, it’s coffee. At night, it’s usually a glass of good bourbon or scotch. Afternoons I’m not too busy with day-job work and don’t have other plans, I will go to a coffee shop to write. Some evenings, I’ll go to a bar with my writing journal, the seedier the better, and take notes about people who are around, overheard conversations, etc.

What I usually can’t do while I’m writing is listen to music, though it doesn’t disturb me too much when I’m working from a coffee shop or bar. If I do listen to music, it’s usually some sort of noisy avant-garde or free jazz selection.

I can barely believe we’ve made it to our tenth issue of Steel Toe Review–not without our ups and downs, but here we are not much worse for wear than we were a year ago. What’s exciting is that it seems to keep getting better with every issue. Even more exciting is the fact that we are on the verge of publishing a print anthology featuring the best pieces we published during our first year. And this is super important–we need your help with that project.

Go to to our Kickstarter page to help support us. A pledge of even $1 is helpful. If you donate a little more, there are a number of rewards available, including free books and internet serenades.

The impetus behind STR generally is to connect Birmingham writers and artists with a community of like-minded people elsewhere. The print anthology will further that goal by, literally, putting our work in peoples’ hands.

In addition, we have a fancy new mailing list. You can now sign up voluntarily to have the new issue of STR delivered to your email whenever it comes out, free of charge. And when you are tired of us, you can simply unsubscribe.

And finally–look! Issue #10 is here, and it looks very promising indeed.

I think perhaps the hardest thing about writing is to get into and stay in the right frame of mind for writing for an extended period. I can’t be too relaxed or too amped. If I’m tired, like when I first wake up, I can’t think at all. Have to have some coffee. But too much coffee, and my mind is all over the place. Some exercise sometimes helps clear the head sometimes, but I can also use it as a distraction so the only thoughts entering my head are about how many calories I’m burning and not about the story I’m working on. Anything can be a distraction. Staring at a computer screen rarely helps, and often is also a distraction. Sometimes, I have to print out what I’m working on and take to it with a pen. Or I just grab a notebook and get some thoughts down that way.

For a lot of writers, the ritual is very important–sitting down at a certain time every day with things arranged just so, distractions put to the side. My schedule seems to be too unpredictable to ever settle down into such a routine. Between paid work, grad school, the Birmingham Free Press, Steel Toe Review, Ghost Herd, and a relationship, my to-do list is a constantly shifting jigsaw puzzle. One might suggest dropping one or two of these activities to create more time, but they are all intertwined like a pit of anacondas in heat. Each project supports the others in some way or another, either financially or by facilitating connections with other creative people that can help me or inspire me. Also, if I can’t seem to finish that short story, maybe I can write an exposé about the Shepherd Bend coal mine, and at least then I’ve written something that day.

I’ve been known to go on long walks, sometimes for an entire day, with just a notebook and a pen, circling through sentences in my head, occasionally sitting down somewhere to scribble out my notes. Then I’ll come home and type everything up later, editing as I go. This is, in fact, my preferred way to work, but often, the weather, or my non-literary responsibilities, prevent me from going on these expeditions. It’s rare that I have a day, or even a couple of hours, that I can spend that way.

I’m trying to flesh out a short story right now, but I’m writing this blog post instead. Sometimes, I have to work on two things at once. Write a couple of sentences on one topic and then go  back to the other project, because I can’t stop my  brain from jumping around from one to the other anyway.

So I don’t know what to do exactly to improve this situation. It will definitely be one of my goals in 2012 to be more organized about this process. It’s also one of my goals to do more walking.

We believe we can say that our first issue was a success both from the standpoint of the quality of material we ended up with and with the readership we acquired. However, we are making a couple of changes based on lessons learned over the past two months.

December was slow, traffic-wise, what with all the holidays and such and all the content we were not posting. To rectify this, moving forward, we are going to start taking more advantage of the blog format facilitated by the WordPress platform we are using. Instead of doing a typical “issue” every month or two as initially planned, we will begin posting content as we approve it.

For the January 2011 issue, we have already made our selections, but we will post one or two pieces every couple of days throughout the month. We will keep doing an editor’s note periodically along with a table of contents that will be updated as new work is posted, thus creating the illusion of preserving the old-fashioned print media paradigm of “issues.”

To kick off the new issue, please enjoy Brent Stauffer’s short story, “A Good Snow.”

I’m supposedly going to be on the radio in New Orleans Monday morning (about 7am Central time — remember to account for the time change). Christopher Tidmore will be interviewing me about my novel Zen, Mississippi on his morning show, which you can also listen to online right here.

I met Mr. Tidmore this afternoon at the NOLA Bookfair, about which I will write more after the weekend. He is a writer for the Louisiana Weekly who ran for the state House of Representatives here in Louisiana in 2007. He seemed intrigued by the title of my book. Perhaps he will still want to talk to me after he has actually read it.

One quick story about the book fair, because it relates to radio. I sold two books to a very nice lady who swears she heard about me on NPR yesterday, which I’m pretty sure could not possibly be true, and I even told her so, but she stuck to her story. So maybe I’m more famous than I thought.

The first issue of Steel Toe Review, a new online literary arts journal I founded, includes my most recent short story, “Catching Frogs.”

The issue also includes great fiction from Sarah Fisch and Louis Bourgeois, poetry from Zach Bush and Jim Valvis, and a creepy video by Frog.