Around the house, there’s laundry prep and meal prep.

For the kids, there’s book report prep and school uniform prep (see above laundry prep), and don’t forget tomorrow’s lunch prep. If I’m really on the ball, there’ll be breakfast smoothie prep. But let’s not get too excited, kids.

That’s just today.

And that leaves out me. Yep, even pantsers require a bit of preparation.

For work, there’s interview prep and invoicing prep. For committee A, there’s spreadsheet prep; for B, there’s list prep. For this blog, there’s reading prep and photo credit prep.

For my creative writing, there’s research: that’s composition prep. There’s writing group meeting prep.

Then comes the age old litany of publication prep. In other words: revise, revise, revise before a piece has a shot at finding a home in a literary journal. And all that’s before submission prep.

The process of submitting to literary journals and magazines has changed in recent years. (I’ve talked here about how sites like Submittable are making it easier to submit your poetry and fiction.) Still, it remains a time-consuming–albeit formative–exercise to close in on the right journals to which to submit, to discover the dozen or two or three (out of the thousands) of journals and magazines that might work for your creative work: (i.e. your veritable guts on the page).

For my creative writing friends out there, here’s where the submission prep gets a little easier.

It’s called Literistic. From their website: “Every month, we collect an exhaustive list of deadlines for submissions to literary publications, contests and fellowships and send out an email.”

What sets Literistic apart, as far as I can see, is that, hailing from Canada, they collect deadlines for publications, etc., from the U.S., Canada, and the UK, so this may be helpful to some of my writerly friends across the pond.

That’s Literistic’s deal. And if you decide the deal’s for you and you subscribe to their list of literary deadlines using this link, I’ll get a little compensation.*

So, happy house-, kid-, creative-, or whatever other kind of prepping you’ve got going on, and Happy Monday!

This post was in repose to Lorna’s prompt for this week, Prep, over at her fabulous blog, Gin & Lemonade

*This is an affiliate link, but I only recommend services I like.