I’m not writing today about how to write suspense, but rather about the sense of suspense I am living in.

I posted back at the end of March that I had submitted my first real story submission, and in the 3+ months since then, I haven’t updated here with how that submission turned out yet. That’s because I still don’t know.

Most professional writing markets have a pretty quick turn-around time. From what I’ve seen online, two to four weeks seems a pretty consistent standard, depending on the specific market. But I submitted not to a typical market (a magazine) but instead to a contest. It’s a quarterly contest, so it has four deadlines a year.

And the people who submitted to the same deadline as I did are starting to receive word of how their entries have fared. There’s a forum on the website for the contest, and a few dozen writers are populating a thread with word of whether they’ve been rejected or not. (For this particular contest, there’s the initial rejections, then those that are considered further before being weeded out, and then finally the winners.)

I have not yet received word of a rejection, while reports are trickling in from other authors that they have.

This is leaving me in a heightened state of suspense. Am I about to receive the same rejection letter they did? Statistically speaking, that is the most likely option. But I have no idea. Will I receive a different email, with better news? Who knows?

But for the past 18 hours, as I’ve been constantly refreshing the forum website, there has been little else getting accomplished here at SheanHQ.

Wish me luck, here I go!

Matt