It may still feel like 90 degrees outside with 100 percent humidity, but it’s actually time to get started on your plan for autumn. My favorite season is right around the corner, and as always it’ll bring many changes for my routine and schedule. As a grad student, I’m still on that academic schedule that I’ve been on since I was in kindergarten, taking the summers off to laze around and then leaping headlong into activity and work again in the fall. I know not everyone gets the luxury of this schedule, but nevertheless, a new season is always a chance to start fresh. So here are a few goals you could set for your writing life for the fall.

It’s publishing season! Swing into literary magazines.

Many literary magazines take the summer off and don’t accept submissions. But they spring back into action in the fall; not only do they read stories, they also have many fiction and poetry contests at this time. So dust off your resume, polish off that story you’ve tweaked over the summer, and send it out to a few places. Save your rejections and send more work to magazines that encourage more in their notes.

A new season brings new story ideas!

So you’ve been fiddling with that one story all summer, writing a paragraph here and there, tweaking and rearranging and polishing. That’s all well and good, but a new season brings a chance for that rare spark of new-story energy. As I change my milieu and head back to school in the fall, I often get a rush of new creative thoughts and ideas. Those ideas shouldn’t go to waste just because I’m still working on an old draft. So in the fall, I put aside old work and try writing fresh for a while, following my creative energy wherever it takes me.

Read, read, read.

Another important aspect of fall, at least for me, is a return to a more studious mindset. I’ve let myself get a little mentally lax over the summer, but the fall brings a chance to return to my old sharpness. One of the ways to do that is to return to a regular reading schedule. It’s time to get through that stack of books on my shelf that I haven’t read. Sometimes it can help to boil it down to a very mathematical equation. Count the number of chapters in a book you want to read, so that you’ll know how many days you should take to finish it. Then make sure you read at least a chapter of the book a day. It will keep you thinking about writing and reading a little each day, and it will get you more excited to do that new story writing yourself.

Are you gearing up for autumn? How are you doing it? What goals are you setting for yourself this season?