More Submissions Please

Haven't I been the busy one? There's a stack of submissions to literary journals that I'm responsible for, all to add to the anxiety of waiting. It's been six months of wondering about the Blue Mesa Review, but that being the oldest I don't pay it much mind these days.

No, it's the August round of submissions that has me on edge. Three months isn't long, if you're expecting any sort of answer from one of the journals, but I thought that the darling editors of the Crab Orchard Review would have an answer by now. They said the submission window would close at the end of October, and here it is November, and....could it be?

Can't be, of course. According to their updated site, they've left the window open for another month. In need of more fresh stories blowing in, I expect. There sits the fiction editor, reading over the slush, only to collapse in rage and frustration. Nothing good enough, said editor declares. We must have more. The diamond in the rough must be found. More roughage!

Does that make mine a perhaps? Unless something better turns up in the extended round? Should I pray that no one else sends them a story, light a candle and offer up a rosary? Would a novena do, to ask that they get no other submissions but decide to go ahead with the edition anyway, lame and weak though the fiction pieces might be?

Three months gone with no word. The editors say that if I don't hear from them in five months, it means they're considering the piece. How's that for a carrot dangling from a stick? No word in five months is the candle in the window, the beacon of hope. That gives me another two months to haunt the mail box daily, praying that I don't get my SASE back from them any time soon.