Tracking lit mag reading periods is nightmare fuel (but puppies)

September updates.

Sep 21, 2023

Ever wonder what an auditing spreadsheet looks like for over 3000 literary magazines? Well, today’s your lucky day.

I know, hot.

But that isn’t the worst of it. By comparison, that’s fun. The real pain in the neck (literally & figuratively) is reading periods. Reading periods are the times where a magazine is open for submissions. Sounds simple, but here’s the thing…

Some magazines are always open, some say they are but aren’t, some temporarily close, some close for good. Some roll from one issue to the next, some have recurring reading periods, others say they do, but don’t. Some have open dates without deadlines, others with deadlines but no open dates. Still more have four periods, two themed, half print, one contest, and a special monthly prompt for 16-24 year olds who love kittens.

In total, there are general, pitches, themes, anthologies, contests, print, online, genre, free, paid, capped, novel, novella, collections that don’t recur or recur weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly (but not this year!). Mags announce periods through guidelines, web posts, newsletters, twitter, instagram, submission managers, phone tag, ESP, and osmosis.

I….hate them. I really do.

I can’t sleep on my left side without a screaming pain in my shoulder. I can’t roll to my right, or the next morning, I’ll wake up with a stiff hip. So every night, I fall asleep flat on my pack, pillow tucked under my knees, and try to stop thinking about the best way to restructure our reading periods on Chill Subs. Whatever is responsible for building the human body, they sure as hell did not intend it to sit at a computer ten hours a day navigating the amorphous blob of data that is indie lit’s reading periods.

Nikita (designer) and I use Telegram to communicate a lot for one reason. One sticker exists on Telegram that, of all available messenger apps, best expresses baffled frustration.

iMessage can make all the updates they want, but until they give me that fucking bird, I’ll never be able to truly express myself.

But you know what helps? This was a killer idea from Marcin, our front-end developer (yeah, I use words like front end now cause I totally know what the that means.) We have a warm feelings chat now!

Yep, whenever you say nice things to us in emails, on socials, or whatever, we screenshot it and send it to our warm feelings chat. Cause, we all pretty much do 5 different jobs each without salaries so we’re pretty much subsisting on warm feelings right now. Warm feelings and puppies.

No, seriously. Let me explain.

My partner and I live in Mtskheta Georgia (about 10,000 miles outside Atlanta). In Georgia, there are stray dogs and cats everywhere. Georgians are some of the kindest people on earth and that extends to animals. They are always feeding them and everyone lives sort-of side by side as friends. (The barking until 3AM isn’t great, I’ll admit). And we often wake up to things like this:

That’s Red. We name all of the stray cats ‘Red’ after our Airbnb host who accused us of having a cat one time.

For example, meet Red, Red, Red, Red, Red, and Red.

So a couple weeks ago, Karina and her husband Kiryl. Yes, he has a name. I hate when one part of a couple’s whole existence is being “so-and-so’s [insert relationship status].” He even has his own magazine!

So, Karina and Kiryl moved to our village (into a much-much nicer airbnb that is cheaper than ours!)

Ours:

Thiers:

ffs.

So we started working at Karina and Kiryl’s and one day Karina says, “OK, when do you want to have a puppy break today?”

What is this, Google? Puppy breaks? Well, let me explain. See, while some of us have been dealing with reading periods (not unlike puzzling out a pile shredded documents while wet) Karina has been totally revamping our login. Now, I’m not a developer, but I imagine that’s a bit like being a five-star chef set to the task of making 10,000 sugar-free cookies.

So, when you have a team of unpaid folks buried in tedious but necessary tasks, and the world hands you puppies.

You go play with the goddamn puppies.

If you like what we’re doing over here and want to help us afford to live in 2 bedroom and periodically feed puppies, every paid subscription to this newsletter helps us tremendously. You can do that here:

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