As I’ve mentioned before, I submitted a story back in July to the Machine of Death Volume 2 anthology. They were planning to get back to everyone by October 31, but due to the sheer volume of submissions (over 2,000!) they pushed the respond-to-everyone date back to Friday, November 4.
For those playing along at home, that’s tomorrow. Which means that sometime in the next 48 hours, after more than three months of waiting, I will get an e-mail that says one of two things: “Congratulations, you’ve won $200 and the first major publication credit of your entire life!“ OR “lol nope.”
Here’s what the two halves of my schizophrenic brain are doing right now.
Okay there are 2,000 entries and they’re going to pick 30. That’s only 1.5%!
Shush, it’s not like they’re using a random number generator. You have much better odds than that. It was a good story.
It was an OKAY story. Here, let me open it up and point out every conceivable flaw in –
That, uh, won’t be necessary. Look, this isn’t Armageddon here. If you get rejected, you just move on to the next story. The important thing is that you tried. You’ll get there sooner or later.
I WANT IT NOW
I couldn’t have guessed.
They’re probably contacting the people they accepted first, in case some of them back out and they have to find backups. They’ll e-mail rejections last. We haven’t heard back yet so that probably means they already rejected us and just haven’t told us yet.
I feel like that line of reasoning might be considered “unproductive.”
WHAT IF THEY REJECT ME OH MY GOODNESS
You know as well as I do that judging a writing contest is extremely subjective. A rejection doesn’t necessarily mean the story was bad. Sometimes it just comes down to the judges’ individual tastes, or even what mood they’re in.
BUT WHAT IF WE GET IN WOULDN’T THAT BE THE GREATEST THING EVER EVER
You keep this up much longer and we’re going to start looking crazy.
Oh please. You want it just as bad as I do.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
It’s cool. I didn’t want to sleep tonight anyway.
I’ll post the results on Monday.
Brian D. Buckley 
Lol good luck.
Are you going to post machine of death on the blog after the contest?
Not sure yet. That’ll depend on several factors, including: 1) Whether it gets accepted for publication, 2) what the Machine of Death policy is about that sort of thing, and 3) whether many of y’all are interested in seeing it.