It’s not hard to see why this is advisable. During busy periods it’s easy to let writing slip to the bottom of the “to do” pile – or even to neglect it altogether. By making it part of your daily routine you ensure that the words in your head actually get put to paper in a timely fashion. You set a rule for yourself – to write every day – and this gives you permission to prioritize writing over other tasks.

Writing every day also has another great benefit: it helps you practice the creative process. There’s a name for the state of being completely absorbed in a task, and that name is “flow”. It’s often characterized by intense focus, productivity, and being “lost” or “carried away” by something that one is working on. It’s a state that writers are almost famous for struggling to achieve. How many times have you heard complaints about writers block? A lack of inspiration? “Stuckness”? All these are the same things: a lack of flow.

But, as with anything, it’s possible to practice achieving a state of flow – to get better and better at it until you can get there without hours of sitting staring at a blank screen and blinking cursor.

I discovered this for myself when, at the start of this year, I set myself a challenge: I would write and publish a short story for every single day of 2015. Three-hundred-and-sixty-five in all. It was an ambitious schedule, and I decided that the only way I would be able to meet it was by ensuring that I wrote at least something every single day.

I dedicated half an hour each morning to working on my daily fictions. During that half an hour I would sit at my computer and force myself to type. This might sometimes result in me finishing three stories, or it might sometimes result in me finishing none. Indeed, in the beginning, most of my writing sessions produced little that was useable. It was a real struggle to get my brain in gear and actually start putting words to paper. I was easily distracted, and many times the half hour would pass without me writing down a single word. As time went on though, it got noticeably easier. Just as with anything, practice makes perfect. By making sure that I wrote each and every day, I was practicing not just the process of writing, but the process of concentrating. I was practicing achieving a state of flow.

I noticed how much my routine helped me write most of all when I broke it. Twice, while traveling, I missed two or three days of writing. When I came back after the break, suddenly everything was much more difficult again. Once more I struggled to focus, lacked ideas, and couldn’t seem to get my stories to work. I couldn’t achieve that state of blissful focus that had carried me through the last few months of stories. It was a real struggle to re-establish my routine, and get back to being able to work productively again.

You can think of a routine as something that gains in momentum the longer you do it for. If you haven’t written a single word for the last three months, half an hour of writing might seem like a real struggle. If, however, you’ve been doing just that every day for the past five years it won’t be hard to carry on! It’s also worth noting that you don’t need to take a huge chunk out of your day-to-day activities in order to establish a routine. By spending just half an hour each day writing I’ve managed to add up a total of fifty-thousand words – almost a novel! Little chunks of time add up, and so little chunks are often all it takes. With that in mind, let me be the first to wish you luck in forming your new writing routine.

Bio: Krishan Coupland is on the Creative Writing PhD programme at the University of East Anglia. His writing has appeared in Ambit, Aesthetica, Litro and Fractured West. He publishes a story a day at unlikelyislands.blogspot.com. In his spare time he runs and edits a literary magazine.

Eifrig Publishing is a small independent publishing company that focuses on publishing children’s books. They also publish family psychology books, some non-fiction for adults, and books on education. They publish some eBooks. Their motto is “good for our kids, good for our environment, and our good for our communities.”

Their website is easy to navigate, they don’t mention much about distributors, contracts, or anything along those lines. However they are focused on selling books over recruiting new authors, which is a good sign.

They were founded in 2006. It is important to note that the owner of the company has self published one of her own books under an imprint of the companies name.

The covers of the books themselves vary in quality although the Children’s books appear to be thoughtfully illustrated.

They have very specific book proposal guidelines that focus a lot on marketing and expect a fair amount of market research. However, they are open to proposals even if the manuscript is incomplete, which is unusual.

You can read their complete submission guidelines here. You can browse their website here.

Barrelhouse is a respected and prestigious literary journal that accepts very few of the submissions it receives. They are primarily a biannual print publication, but they also have an online edition that publishes different work as well.  They publish poetry, short fiction, non-fiction, and flash fiction. They like to publish well crafted writing with a sense of humor.

Unlike most literary journals they want to bridge the gap between serious art and mainstream pop culture. In fact the only non-fiction they publish is work that directly interacts with pop culture.

Stories originally published in Barrelhouse have been featured in the Best American Nonrequired Reading, Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, and the Million Writer’s Award.

They pay $50 to each contributor to their print issues, as well as two contributor copies. Online contributors are not currently paid. Not only does Barrelhouse pay their writers, the editors have taken a vocal stand against charging writer’s submission fees, a growing trend that a lot of the more prestigious journals have embraced.

They only accept submissions through the submission manager Submittable. They tend to publish fiction and non-fiction shorter than 8,000 words in length, but they are occasionally publish work that is longer than that.

Poets can submit up to five poems at a time, all other writers must just submit one piece at a time. It takes them about three months to respond to most submissions.

To learn more, or to submit, visit their website here.