Started reading at a lit magazine this semester (Bat City Review). It opened my eyes about one aspect of the submission game that people don't talk about, which is how long it takes for a piece to get rejected, even if it has no chance of ever being published. As an initial reader, I can either recommend a piece be looked at by the editorial board, or recommend against the piece being looked at by the rest of the board. Only a very small fraction of pieces get to the stage where they're discussed by the board, and only a small fraction of those will make it to publication. I've submitted recommendations against dozens of pieces, which should be the kiss of death for a given piece, but many of these pieces are still hanging in limbo (not rejected, still listed as "in-progress" with no communication to the submitter), even though everyone knows they're not going to have any chance of being discussed by the editorial board or moving forward in our process. I don't know when rejections are going to formally come out, but the vast majority of submitters could have gotten rejections (and moved on with their lives) from our publication within only a few short weeks of submission. This dilly-dallying about formally rejecting pieces is a very cruel and very unnecessary game played by the editors. There's actually no reason why it should take months for magazines to respond to the vast majority of the pieces that they get.