Austin Living is in the early stages of planning for its second edition of Austin Expression, a literary magazine that runs in the July-August issue.

So start getting your poetry, short fiction and art submissions ready.

Last year, we debuted Austin Expression as a way to give the Austin and Mower County communities — and people with ties to Austin and Mower County — a chance to show and publish their creative endeavors.

We saw a great response with dozens of submissions from around the community. From our perspective, it was a success.

That said, the first year was a learning process for us at Austin Living. We see many ways we can improve the process on our end, including potential tweaks to submission guidelines and more.

Keep an eye out for another column to come soon with the final submission guidelines and deadlines once we finalize plans for this year.

This year’s guidelines for Austin Expression will also be presented and discussed briefly at a few Austin Page Turners events this year, so keep an eye out if you attend. We should have fliers available at those meetings and on the Herald website by then.

But before then, start getting your submissions ready so we can display the best of Austin and Mower County’s creative side this summer.

 Tentative submission guidelines

Though we may adjust the submission guidelines a bit this year, here’s what we accepted last year to help out artists and writers begin planning for their 2016 submissions.

We will accept essentially anything that can be printed or represented in a magazine format. If you are not sure, submit anyway.

We’re taking visual pieces: Illustrations, photos and paintings, along with images of mixed media, sculptures, clay and other such pieces. We ask that these pieces be submitted as print-ready .jpgs.

We’re taking text-based pieces: poems, song lyrics, and short fiction and nonfiction (500-1,000 words), along with selections of longer pieces.

When in doubt, submit anyway.

If we have the great response we did last year, we won’t be able to include every submission, but we’ll include as many pieces as space allows.