Okay, so we've hit February, and we're just over a third of the way through posting all of the contest entries for initial voting. There are 27 groups in total, with a final count (unless I missed something) of 321 stories.
I know a lot of people have been getting anxious to see their stories posted, and are wondering when it'll happen. I understand that feeling. Only a few of you have e-mailed me to say "Where the hell is my story I e-mailed it two days ago and it's not up on the boards yet what did I do wrong oh my god TELL ME PLEASE?!?!?!" To those of you who didn't do that, you have my gratitude, and my sympathy if it was tempting.
I am e-mailing people as their stories get posted to let them know. Unfortunately, I haven't had time to send acknowledgement e-mails for all the hundreds of stories. I have checked the word count on all of them and put them into groups, however. If you sent to contest@escapepod.org and you didn't receive a rejection message from me saying that your story was too long, you can trust that it's in there somewhere. Story length, i.e. going over 300 words, is the only reason we have rejected any stories. (Well, that and one person who sent me 10 stories in the same message.)
But I can tell you here, all at once, in general terms, what the date ranges are. If you can remember (or find in your send logs) when you e-mailed your story, this'll probably let you deduce your approximate group.
In general, if you followed the rules, you can expect your first story to be posted in the following groups:
Group 11 contains stories from 1/21 through 1/22 (and a few from 1/25, because of an organizational error)
Group 12 contains stories from 1/22 through 1/23
Group 13 contains stories from 1/22 through 1/25
Group 14 contains stories from 1/23 through 1/27
Group 15 contains stories from 1/27
Group 16 contains stories from 1/27 through 1/28
Group 17 contains stories from 1/28
Group 18 contains stories from 1/28 through 1/29
Group 19 contains stories from 1/29
Groups 20 and 21 contain stories from 1/30
Group 22 contains stories from 1/30 through 1/31
Groups 23 through 27 contain stories from 1/31
Yes, you all are a bunch of procrastinators. >8-> I'm giving you this list so you'll know when to start looking for your story. If you didn't send it until January 30, there's no point in asking me about it before Group 20 goes up. And so forth.
Now, there are a few things that can throw your group off:
If you sent to submit@escapepod.org instead of contest@escapepod.org, you're going to be in a later group than I said above. That's because you sent it to the wrong address. Scott's been forwarding messages to me if they're obviously contest entries, but he gets to them a few days later, and I'm slotting them based on my receipt date at the contest address. You'd be surprised how many people did this.
If you sent more than one story, then we're bending over backwards to make sure your stories don't all end up in the same group. This is actually for your benefit, to prevent your stories from competing against each other in the first round. But it means your second and third stories may end up in a later group than your date suggests. (Usually the next consecutive group, but not always.)
If you sent multiple stories in the same message, it gets even more complicated. I didn't specifically prohibit this, so a lot of people did it, but it throws off our organizing scheme which is based on IMAP mail folders. I had to forward multiple copies of your e-mail back to myself just so I could put it into three folders. This isn't strictly bad, but it does make the dates all wacky for your second and third stories. I did the best I could to keep them close together, but I can't make any guarantees. Just trust that if your first story goes up, your other two eventually will too.
...Whew. I hope this made a slight degree of sense to someone. If you have any questions I didn't cover, feel free to ask. And if you've sent us stories before January 21 and haven't seen a single one yet, e-mail me or send me a private message and I'll try to figure out what's going on.
Thanks again. Man, has this gotten big. >8->
