Short Story, Long: Summer Break

Happy halfway-through 2026!

We mentioned at the beginning of the month that we’re taking a little break from publishing new stories. During that break, we’ve already had a handful of “bonus material” updates that I think have been fun, including roundtable discussions with our submission readers and also with the artists who have contributed art for the stories in the last twelve months, and we’ve got a couple more coming.

In the meantime, we took last week off off, and are doing do again today/this week, but I wanted to send out a quick little note.

1. Submissions close today! If you’ve been wanting to submit but haven’t yet, you have until midnight (ET) tonight!

   1. Note: we’ve been open all June and are currently at… 822 submissions. That’s SO. MANY. It’ll likely take us a little longer to get through all of these than we’d like, but we’re going to try to be as timely as possible. Thanks for bearing with us!

2. Summer break from publishing new stories is maybe a perfect opportunity to remind you of our RANDOM feature! We’re incredibly proud of all the stories in our archives, and if you don’t know where to start, maybe try one at random!

   1. If you check out a random story and like what you find, we’d love to hear about it! Leave it as a comment here!

Thanks.
—Aaron Burch
Editor, Short Story, Long