The first round of the Diabolical Plots submission window is complete! 1938 submissions, 120 of them held for the final round, about 20 of those will be accepted. Every submitter should have received either a hold request or a rejection; if not, query immediately.

The first round is designed to handle a large volume of subs and bring it to a more manageable quantity of stories that are in the ballpark, so to speak. Each story evaluated on it's own to see if we think it is close enough, we don't want to waste the writer's time if its not.

That doesnt mean stories rejected in round one werent close: they might have been, but a focus is on trying to handle the submissions in reasonable time so detailed critiques are not something we can do much of.

The second round goes slower (in terms of resolutions per day) because the focus is on detailed evaluation. Unlike the first round, round 2 is all about comparing one story with another, rank ordering the hold pile.

Since in round 1 the evaluations are independent that process can be somewhat parallelized, first readers casting votes and both me and @QuiteVague resolving submissions.

Round 2 cannot be parallelized because I personally rank order them. A new twist this year is that Ziv had the newly granted ability to hold stories so there are some stories in the hold pile I haven't personally read yet!

So, about 1 in 6 of those held will get acceptances, this may take a week or three? I do also consider it important for everything in the hold pile to get personal responses so that takes some time as well!

These responses may have specific suggestions especially if one of us had a specific point that lowered their evaluation, like the ending being too abrupt or something.

But they might also just be "we really enjoyed this because it was fun and sweet and we loved this line and it was close but didnt quite make it", because there are ones here that we would love to publish but cant, so sometimes that will be the only reason.