It's almost summer, which means it's time to take vacations and go for long walks and write outside and . . . stop submitting?

That is what you might be thinking If you were anywhere near Twitter at the beginning of this month, a witness to journals everywhere sounding their dinner bells and declaring their last calls. Typically, on June 1^st, many journals close their submissions for the summer. This is because most literary journals are in some way affiliated with academic institutions, so when the student readers leave for the summer, so do the editorial staff members. Which means on June 1^st of this year, the Submittable newsfeed was the most depressing thing ever. It was one long totem pole of frantic retweets from journals urging everyone to SUBMIT TONIGHT because LAST CHANCE and CLOSING TOMORROW.

Last summer was my first summer submitting to journals, and, I’m not going to lie, the process was a little rough. I kept submissions moving (kinda), but definitely slowed down. I remember one night I spent three hours trying to send a story to five places. I kept clicking on websites, on writing guidelines, on mastheads, only to discover that sorry, no, we’re not accepting submissions until September.

But before you get discouraged or spend three hours looking for a place to send a single story, take heart. There are many places still open and accepting submissions. You just have to find them.

Lucky for you, I spent the last two weekends compiling a (very rough) submission wish list. Keep in mind: I haven’t whittled this down to places I actually want to submit yet, just threw every journal from every list I could find onto it and arranged it by reading period until I can attack it with a little more discretion and taste. But if the list proves anything, it’s that even though the dropoff of reading periods in the summer months is considerable—my October wish list is seventy-two journals long, for instance, where my July wish list is thirty—there are still MANY places to submit to. Way more than I thought there would be.

And in case you don’t like my list (and I wouldn’t blame you: it is crazy ambitious, seeing as though I haven’t added in any of the online or smaller journals that I love), there’s also this list that a friend sent to me yesterday.

So the point is this: Don’t let the summer slow down your submitting game. Keep that work flowing and take the opportunity to submit to journals lower down on your list or investigate new ones to add to it.