So... I know I've heard it's fairly easy to have a paper accepted one way or another at the large Medieval Studies Congress at Kalamazoo. If you apply to a special or sponsored session and they pass on your paper, your paper will likely be placed in a general session. There's room for as many people as possible and ludicrously large numbers of people do present. There are usually something like 40 simultaneous sessions at any given moment.

However, I've also hear it takes up to months to hear back from the conference as to whether or no a paper has been accepted, especially for those papers ending up in the General session. Last year, I knew before some of the presenters that their papers had been accepted when I saw their names in the program book. In other words, some people don't find out until January.

I submitted my proposal to a special session via email less than a week ago, on Wednesday. Yesterday, email returned to me which fairly clearly implies that my proposal's been accepted for the session I was after. It sure looks that way! Talk about a fast turnaround time. The funny thing is, it doesn't say it's been accepted. It just says, here's the session abstracts and forms needed to go to the Congress, does everything look good? Give or take the spelling of my name, it does indeed.