We happy few who specialize in short stories obsess about the length of time our little masterpieces sit waiting for verdicts by editors. We tend to read the results like tea leaves. And so on the Short Mystery Fiction Society list you get messages like I just received a rejection after 49 days from Cozy Ax Murder Quarterly. That is 3.74 days longer than typical from CAMQ but keep in mind there was a headwind and Mercury was in retrograde...
I have been playing with spreadsheets lately (more on that next time) and I thought this might interest you. The chart below shows how long my stories had been waiting at magazines and anthologies on the first day of each month from December 2024 to January 2026. The blue line is the longest number of days any story was waiting for an editorial decision. The brown line is the average (mean) number of days. And the gray line represents the median (for those who haven't taken math in a long time, that means half the stories have been waiting longer, and half shorter).
(I wrote this on December 26. The next day a story was rejected and I had to revise the chart. Natch.)
The number of stories ranges from 10 to 17 depending on the month.
Now, back to my tea leaves...
