When my work goes from RECEIVED to IN-PROGRESS on Submittable, it’s a great feeling, at first. Someone is finally looking at my writing.

As the days, weeks, months progress, I become split between the happiness at the possibility of acceptance and the despair at the possibility of rejection. At least with IN-PROGRESS, I know someone has at least been assigned my work and may have opened the file.

There is a darker side… the RECEIVED that sits for months or even years. I literally have a submission that’s been sitting in Submittable for over two years. I often wonder why it takes a place so long to move my submission from RECEIVED to IN-PROGRESS, but who am I to tempt the fickle gods of the submission cosmos?

Every day, I check the status of my work on Submittable. My daily ablution. My daily shame. I also check the recent responses on Duotrope just to see the turnover on rejections and acceptances. It feeds my compulsive behavior. I think that both of these acts don’t help me feel any better about myself or my writing. I think they just give me a false sense of control. And yet, I am compelled to do them.

I am grateful that Submittable exists. When I was in my MFA program, I am pretty sure everything had to be physically mailed to a journal. I don’t even know when the online submission process even started. Living in Japan, the online submission process has made my writing life so much easier.

I may be frustrated with the state of my submission queue but at least there is one I can look at daily.