Okay, so I’ve waded through most of the submissions now. I’ve still got 27 in my inbox that I haven’t read yet. Everything else has either been rejected or been set aside for further consideration (or possibly inexplicably lost–possible, but unlikely).

I want to say again how pleased I’ve been with the overall quality of submissions. I only wish more of them were shorter and/or I had more room for stories in the issue. Unfortunately, I received many stories that pushed the word count limit (5000), and some that exceeded it. Well, it wouldn’t be unfortunate if they were no good, but a lot of them were, so there’s going to be a lot of tough choices to make.

Looks like I have 29 in the “Under Consideration” folder, totalling more than 113,000 words. Admittedly, some of those are just stories I think I need to re-read to make sure before I pass on them, but still — that’s a lot of good fiction there, and less than a quarter of that is going to make it into the issue, so competition will be fierce.

For those wondering about overall numbers, I’ve got 100 stories in the rejection folder, so add that together with the 27 unread and the 29 under consideration, looks like we got 156 stories submitted overall.