The Vampire Book Club has a feature, asking the contributors to Ellen Datlow's Blood and Other Cravings what draws us to vampires or vampirism. They've also got a giveaway, the chance to win a copy of the anthology.
My story "All You Can Do is Breathe" was sparked by an interview I heard on the radio. A survivor of the Childers Backpacker Hostel fire was talking about how it felt, ten years later. He talked about how difficult it was to be a survivor, and how some days, all you can do is breathe.
I'd already had in my mind the idea of a miner who survives a cave in, and this sentence gave me the feeling for the story. I wrote the first draft in a sitting, intensely conscious of my own breathing. I'm not sure if that breath-rhythm comes through the story, but it helped me pace the words out.