written by David Steffen
Hello everyone! Greetings and I hope that you and your family and friends are well, or as well as can be expected.
For the last several years, Diabolical Plots has opened for a regular submission window every July. I’ve found that having a single month every year helps me to compartmentalize the effort involved in reading the submission queue–because I find it exhausting and time-consuming, so I just schedule myself one very busy month where I get very behind on everything else, and then I go back to normal.
This year, because of COVID-19, I do not have the time to spare to handle a submission window properly–I have a full-time dayjob and no childcare, and as much as I dislike changing an established routine like this, I don’t see any way that I could handle the time and effort of a submission window in July.
On the bright side I’ve always kept a pretty long publication schedule between acceptance and publication, which does come in handy at a time like this–I already have the selections made in the 2019 submission window lined up to publish without interruption through March of 2021, so it will be almost a year before any possible disruption to the publication schedule will occur.
When will the next submission window be? I don’t know! Depends on, among other things, when I have childcare again. I will have to revisit that question later as more information is available.
In the meantime I will be doing the best I can trying to handle what I can handle–best of luck and best of health to you and yours!
