Okay, that’s a slight exaggeration. But still, as near as I can tell, between the 2 of us, Kay and I read around 86,000 words today. We’ve just about gotten through all the submissions; then we’ll go back through our pared-down list and keep narrowing until we get to 5 (give or take 1). Currently the narrowed list contains 11 submissions, although there’s a chance one or two could be added before we’ve finished our first read-through.

I got an email from a reader today who said she’d registered for an account on the site, but hadn’t gotten a confirmation email. I went and tried it, and had the same problem. What was weird, though, was that 3 or 4 accounts had been created without issue already today, one of them only an hour before the problem occurred. When I checked the account info, it seemed that the automatic account generator didn’t like something to do with the username this woman was trying to use, and kept resetting it to “unverifieduser_[random string of numbers]”. I contacted Matt, and he was able to manually edit the code to fix the username. But we still have no idea why it happened. Bizarre.

MOST exciting today, though, is that we may have found our first exclusive content for subscribers! An artist is interested in doing a webcomic for us, and we’re going to consult on the story outline to see if it’s something that’s right for us. The artist is very talented and has a great character he’s drawn a number of times; his style would be excellent for a fascinating webcomic. Of course even if it does come to fruition it won’t be for a while, as the story has to be set, then contracts agreed upon, and then we have to have some of the actual comic to post. But still – exciting! More on this as it develops.

Add this to the list of Things Not To Do When Submitting: If the wordcount range is listed at 1000-8000, don’t query asking if the market will accept a 17,000-word story. Really, I can understand querying for 8050, or 950 (the answer is still no), but two times higher than the top of the listed range? You are barking up the wrong market. (in fairness, the particular query that triggered this comment was friendly and professional, the exception being that they were asking if we’d break, bury and salt the earth over our guidelines for them.) For the record, we average around 20,000-22,000 words of Fiction per issue, so having one story take 80-85% of that wouldn’t be terribly prudent.

Flash Fiction Contest! 12 more days! I’m just sayin’.