Have any of you been submitting via Submittable? I've submitted around four pieces to lit mags in the last month via the site. It's handy, having a standard author bio and not having to mess with email addresses. It's also handy having much of your submitted work in one place with at-a-glance status reports. However... do any of you have perspective on what it means for a story to be "in progress" as opposed to "received?" Stories are marked as "received" as soon as you submit them (or so it seems to me). Last night one of my stories' statuses changed to "in progress." The story in question is approximately 21 days old. I submitted another story this morning; its status changed from "received" to "in progress" in less than an hour. Trolling around on the web has (kind of) taught me that "received" means your manuscript has safely arrived in an editor's inbox, and that "in progress" means an editor has done something, no matter how minor, to your MS. It could mean that your MS has merely been assigned to a reader, not that it's been read or anything of similar note. The amount of time it took for these two stories to be changed to "in progress," however, is kind of... well, I don't know if it's weird or not. The times are certainly different. Please tell me if the discrepancy is weird or not! I think I'm stressing over nothing; I would love a draft of comfort and any perspective you'd care to share.
It's not weird. It's like reading an email - different people check their emails at different times, and even then reads different ones at different times. And for editing, the editors probably have a mountain of work behind them, so what's so weird that one editor might be freer than another? Take a breather and go work on something fun, step away from the computer You're fine.
A story marked only as "received" may still actually have been read. "In-progress" appears once the reader has done anything to it, such as moved it, added a note, added a label, etc. As Mckk says though, it's probably not worth obsessing over. You'll hear back from them in time, and the meanwhile could be spent on writing or something else productive.
Yeah, mckk's right. I don't think it's anything to do with the type/quality of the story, just luck really. Perhaps with the second one, you sent it as soon as the editor in question had finished going through all his other emails. It will have pinged up on his computer and he'd have been like "ah, I may as well have a look at this one too".
