Where’s My Short Story?

by Don Webb

This is going to qualify as a quick tour of the “sausage factory.” It’s intended for our contributors, who frequently inquire — as is their right — about the status of their submissions.

First, let me apologize for missing a week in updating the on-line schedule. I started to revise it on Monday, January 18th. But it kept changing almost hourly, like an amoeba on the prowl. I gave up. It’ll restart with issue 370.

The schedule looks like a bunch of different-sized grapes:

Non-fiction (especially essays, book reviews): We had a very good run in the fall quarter of 2009, thanks especially to Danielle L. Parker’s book reviews. Now the book reviews are open, and there are few essays pending.
Poetry and short poetry: We have more than the on-line schedule shows. It’s a matter of updating the official schedule, and that can get complicated: we prefer to keep veteran contributors from appearing in successive issues, for the sake of variety, but that’s not always possible.
Novellas and serials are open at present.
Novels sometimes depend on the authors’ contingency plans for the works. The next one is locked in, but I’m not sure yet which will follow.
Flash fiction is in the trough of a slow cycle and can be scheduled relatively promptly.

Short stories: the situation would be funny if we could catch our breath long enough to laugh. The official schedule has a hundred titles in it, and the number changes daily. At five short stories an issue, we’re set for the next 22 weeks, counting Quarterly Reviews. From our perspective, issue 400 is not very far in the future.

It’s impractical to try to increase the average to six short stories an issue. A lot of short stories are two- or three-pagers; when an issue approaches 15 pages in length, time constraints alone impose a limit. And as always, we think of our readers: give them too little, and they won’t come back; too much, same thing. We try to give you a good week’s worth, but no more than that.

Meanwhile, Coordinating Editor Bill Bowler has sent a status report about the backlog:

Acknowledged: 30
Currently under review: 15
Pending action: > 100

Bottlenecks are always at the top, I’ve observed — at least until you start pouring. To clear up the short-story backlog, Bewildering Stories may have to ask the Review Board to help with acceptances. I’m confident that a team effort can make some headway, but it’s still a Red Queen’s race: what we gain in turnaround time we’ll lose in waiting time.

In Year 1 of Bewildering Stories, issues often contained submissions received the night before. To celebrate our second anniversary, we uploaded our entire backlog into issue 104, which remains one of our truly outstanding issues. We’ve come a long way since then, and the pace keeps picking up.