Vol2 Updates 16 Jul 2011 12:01 am by ryan
Machine of Death 2 deadline reached!
If this posts when it’s supposed to, the deadline for Machine of Death 2 submissions will have just passed.
Thank you to everyone who submitted!
We’re going to have a bunch more posts on where the submissions came from and tons of other really interesting stuff, but here’s what we’ve got so far, early in the morning on the 15th of July:
- over 1200 submissions!
- over 2.2 MILLION words as of July 10th, which is like reading War and Peace four times in a row, and if we published all of them, enough to easily reach the #1 position on Wikipedia’s List of Longest Novels
- submissions from six of seven continents, and the missing seventh one is mostly covered in ice anyway
And these numbers are only going to get larger as we catch up on the submissions. The last few days have been crazy, with at one point 50 stories coming in during one five-minute period alone (and it wasn’t even the deadline!) If you’ve submitted, you’ll be hearing from us! We’ll be reading these over the next few weeks and months, and we’ll let everyone know sometime in October whether they’ve been accepted or not.
There’s going to be tons more posted here over the next few days. But to everyone who submitted: you are awesome, and congratulations! You sat down and made a thing using only your imagination. That’s not easy to do, and you totally pulled it off.
20 Responses to “Machine of Death 2 deadline reached!”
on 16 Jul 2011 at 12:24 am 1.Paul Salvette said …
That’s quite an impressive number of submissions. It should be an excellent anthology. I know it’s asking a lot, but tor the folks who don’t get their submissions accepted, are you going to provide feedback on why you’re rejecting it?
on 16 Jul 2011 at 12:56 am 2.Stacey said …
Wow! I’m going to be biting my nails for ages aren’t I? Good luck with the reading!
on 16 Jul 2011 at 1:10 am 3.Ben White said …
You know, whether I get accepted or not I’m just glad to be a tiny part of this. Thanks to everyone involved for putting this thing together, and happy reading!
on 16 Jul 2011 at 3:39 am 4.Henning said …
Note to self: In case of volume 3, move to Antarctica ASAP!
on 16 Jul 2011 at 4:13 am 5.Epicurean Inkblot said …
Congratulations! It’s a great thing you guys are doing here, and it’s absolutely amazing that your submissions have almost doubled this time around. Looking forward to reading the book when it comes out.
on 16 Jul 2011 at 5:02 am 6.purpleriot said …
Wow! My guess in the Facebook quiz for the total submissions count was way off! Well done.
on 16 Jul 2011 at 6:06 am 7.Danny Dourado said …
A 1/1200 chance, eh? AWESOME.
I’m so looking forward to this, congrats to everyone who had a crack. I love seeing all these inspired people and I loved being a part of this. Bring on October!
on 16 Jul 2011 at 6:41 am 8.PC said …
hey – just wanted to say I’m totally psyched that you’re going to be reading my story, whether it gets chosen or not. Thanks!
on 16 Jul 2011 at 6:43 am 9.PC said …
I just mean – I think I had some interesting ideas, so sharing those ideas is quite exciting to me.
on 16 Jul 2011 at 9:38 am 10.Melanie said …
It’s not 1/1200, it’s more like 1/400, since there’s gonna be 30 stories, not just 1. But that’s in a perfect world, where there is no bias and where all stories are the same length and have the same content, and all are potentially good enough to publish.
The reality is that each category of story has its own contest to win. They won’t publish more than 1 single-sentence joke of a story, so if that’s what you wrote, then you are competing against all the other single-sentence stories. You’re not competing against the 7000 word stories. That puts your odds more like 1/80 or something, though that is a guess I just pulled out of my ear.
THAT, of course, is assuming the story in question is good enough to publish. The reality THERE is that a lot of stories will probably get thrown out for being simply bad. I have no idea what percentage that will be, probably lower than that for a regular publisher’s slush pile though since we are such cool and awesome peeps.
These poor editors are going to end up in a position of having to pick from really good stories and leaving others out simply for lack of room. So it doesn’t come down to ODDS until the last round. First it’s “Is it any good at all.” Then it’s “Okay, it’s technically proficient, but do we like it?” And THEN “Great, but can we USE it?”
At least, that’s what I’ve gathered from reading their posts here. Unfortunately, that doesn’t help us writers much since we all think our stories are good or we wouldn’t have sent them in!
on 16 Jul 2011 at 10:33 am 11.B, Snail said …
Submission sent: 11:59 pm central, with seconds to spare.
I got the automated response back at 12:00 am.
So I’m not sure if I made it in or if I was a few seconds too late!
on 16 Jul 2011 at 10:50 am 12.Chris said …
Oh god the wait for October is gonna be such a bitch. Even if I don’t make it, I have to say, I had a damn good time writing my stories. It was fun getting all these crazy ideas with this excellent concept, and it was fun working with limitations to make your work better.
Can’t wait to see…
on 16 Jul 2011 at 12:27 pm 13.Snow said …
To Paul Salvette: While it would be lovely to get individual feedback on your work – we’ve each of us slaved lovingly over our submissions – the sheer volume they’ve received and the amount of manpower they can bring to bear means that kind of detailed reply isn’t likely to materialise. In the end, at least we each know we tried our best!
on 16 Jul 2011 at 1:09 pm 14.D Fitch said …
FRICKIN CRAZY. Thanks for hosting this, folks.
For stories that are licensed CC-SA and what-not, would you guys consider publishing a batch of “runners-up” that don’t make the physical book online? Just a thought, could be cool.
on 16 Jul 2011 at 2:13 pm 15.Malki ! said …
Some responses:
@Paul #1 — Snow, #13, is right. We wish we could write back to everyone, but there simply isn’t time. This would increase by an order of magnitude the amount of work ahead of us. So I’m sorry to say that it shouldn’t be expected.
@Snail #11 — If you got the autoresponse that said “Your story has been received, we can’t wait to read it” then you’re fine. Late submissions got a different autoresponse reading “We got this email, but you’re late. We may still be able to read it, but we have to put you at the bottom of the stack and may not be able to get to it.” And it’s also important to note that not getting an autoresponse of any kind is not necessarily an indication of submission failure — we’ve learned that sometimes the autoresponder sometimes simply gets bogged down and doesn’t respond to anybody. If you’re biting your nails, you can query us, but if you sent it to the correct address (submit, then the ‘at’ sign, then machineofdeath.net) then the overwhelming odds are that we got it just fine.
@Fitch #14 — I suppose we should have asked folks to specify a sharing license upfront! We didn’t, so right now we don’t have the rights to do anything with the stories that we don’t buy for the book. But it’s something we’ll continue to think about!
@Melanie #10 is right as well. Despite the fact that we’ll be picking 30 stories from 1200 submissions (and the truth is that it is actually many MORE than 1200 now, we’ll have exact numbers soon), your odds are NOT 30/1200 or 0.025%, because we are not drawing stories from a hat. We’re judging them on quality. Just like every horse in a race doesn’t have the same odds of winning.
So, if your story’s not up to par, your odds are 0%. If it’s amazingly wonderfully great, it’s 100% because by God, we’ll make room for it. The tricky part is the middle zone — the sheer volume of submissions DOES make it less likely that we’ll publish stuff that’s only “pretty good,” but one way or another, we hope to find homes, over time and in different ways, for all the work that we fall in love with.
on 16 Jul 2011 at 3:36 pm 16.fluffy said …
For those of us who are impatient for others to read our stories, is it okay if we post our stories on our own sites? I’ve been sharing my submitted stories (and the fragment that both of them grew out of) privately with friends but I’d like to make a more permanent home for them.
DM: That’s fine!
on 17 Jul 2011 at 1:38 am 17.PC said …
I think you could have an “honourable mentions” list of stories that just missed the cut.
That would be very satisfying to the people who wrote them, and then if they wanted to provide a link so people could read it then they could.
on 17 Jul 2011 at 5:15 am 18.B, Snail said …
“If you got the autoresponse that said ‘Your story has been received, we can’t wait to read it’ then you’re fine.”
Okay, great, thanks!
on 18 Jul 2011 at 2:28 am 19.Mike Bonsall said …
I like PC’s #17 suggestion, though it’s an added overhead for the diligent editing team when they just want to knuckle down and concentrate on the stories which will go into the book. I have only a vague concept of the enormity of the task they face, but still it intimidates me. It’s not even as if they’re going to be reading each story just once. They’ll probably read a number of the stories a number of times. Stories they thought were GREAT they will suddenly think are LAME on the third reading. Stories they thought were LAME will be thought GREAT by another editor. SELF DOUBT will creep in, followed by PARANOIA, followed in all likelihood by catatonic dribbling.
Still, I think there is merit in anything which brings the Modders* closer together as a community – this site and all the discussion up to the submission date has been the most pleasant thing about this; in the fun stakes, it’s been head and shoulders above any other submission market I know.
*yes I considered MODS, but that’s already taken by a different subculture.
on 18 Jul 2011 at 7:32 am 20.Paul Salvette said …
Malki thanks for the heads up, and I totally understand you don’t have the manpower to provide responses to each submission. Looking forward to October!