Okay--regardless of whether the story is short or long, our submission guidelines are absolutely what I want to see: I want a query letter, a short synopsis, and the first twenty pages of the story embedded into the email. No attachments. I won't open them and will insta-reject. If your story is twenty-five pages, put the whole thing in. I promise, I won't hold those extra five pages against you.
Length of time depends on where in Musa you submit. You should hear from the submissions editor within a couple of weeks if you've been rejected. If we want to see more, we'll request a full. Anywhere in Musa, you should get a response within a month.
At Penumbra, we run our stories through multiple readings. If your story is passed on to the next round of evaluation, you'll hear back on that within a couple of weeks. But if your story continues to pass down the line and makes it to the final cut, your submission might be there for months. I prefer to set the issues 6-8 weeks before publication, so if you submit, say, a story for the Poe issue in October, the earliest you would hear that we're publishing your story would be August. We *try* to send rejections to every story that doesn't make it, but I know a few have slipped through the cracks--which kind of annoys me, but with hundreds of submissions each month to Penumbra a few mistakes are almost guaranteed to happen. I do not have form rejections at Penumbra, and as stories make it further down the line I tend to write personal rejections. Out of each theme submission call, we also select one author as a 'Rising Talent' -- an unpublished or newly published author who we publish on our website with their story, bio and an nonfiction essay as a free story for our readers.
The main thing to keep in mind when submitting to Musa is that our submission guidelines are there for a reason--and we mean exactly what we say. Just like every other publisher out there, we have our system set up the way it is for a reason. We do our best to stay on top of submissions and faster than most of our peers, and we'll continue to do so as long as we can.
Oh yes--and PLEASE do not PM me on Absolute Write about your submissions or story ideas or what have you. I come to AW to play, and not to field PMs. Any email to Musa submissions can be forwarded directly to me by my staff, and general questions are best answered here.
Thanks!