Saturday, February 14, 2009

A quasi holiday and a question

Happy Valentines Day for all you lovers out there in blogworld.

Now that we have that out of the way, a question.

Which is worse, waiting on a submission with a known long out time or waiting on one with an expected short time out?

7 comments:

Jameson T. Caine said...

For me it's waiting on the expected short one. Longer ones tend to get subbed and then forgotten about because I know I'm in for a wait, but when I know it's only a matter of days or a week or two before I get a response, THEN I am nervous as hell, checking the email about every hour.

Cate Gardner said...

It depends on the market and my mood.

For me it's waiting a to hear from a market that normally rejects stories it doesn't like within a couple of days and hangs onto stories it does for longer. So you've waited a month, you get your hopes up, then three months later you query and it turns out they never received your sub.

Anonymous said...

I say long one. Those SUCK. I sometimes foregrt about them and then when I receive the rejection, it's TWICE as bad.

Aaron Polson said...

I'm split. I rarely forget about the long ones thanks to Duotrope, but sometimes I get blindsided (by both rejections and acceptances) I wasn't thinking about.

Long wait acceptances are awesome. Long wait rejections are the worst.

I probably didn't answer the question.

Jamie Eyberg said...

I don't mind waiting if that is what everyone else is doing but the ones that only hold on for a week or two kill me with anticipation.

Fox Lee said...

Waiting on a long one. I'm a "rip the band-aid off" kind of person.

BT said...

I've only submitted one story to a market which had a response time listed as longer than 3 months, and that was to a market I'd had two other stories accepted at so I don't mind the wait.

It's also in a genre I don't write in anymore so it's like setting and forgetting.

As for waiting in general - I have way too much other stuff on, and I'm always trying to improve on what I've written so I tend to forget about stories all the time (that and my Alzheimer’s kicking in). If I didn't spreadsheet my submission process, I'd completely forget where I'm at.