Waiting Game

I just submitted my first official grant proposal. From submitting a letter of inquiry last week to writing the proposal and then revising, the whole process took about five days, though I didn't work on just this proposal during that time.

Now that I have submitted this document, I have to wait. It will be December or early January before I hear if we have been chosen to submit a full, final proposal. If we are, it'll be June before we ever find out if we got the money.

This delayed timeline for feedback is going to be one aspect of this grant-writing that I really have to get used to. Working in journalism, the turn-around time was pretty fast. Write the story one day, it appears in the next day's paper. If people didn't like it, there was often voice-mails or e-mails waiting when I got to work telling me what was wrong with it.

While I've gotten some feedback from others in my office about the proposal I wrote, I won't know right away if it's impacting the people I'm writing to for several weeks.

What bugs me about this lag time is that it slows down my ability to improve what I'm working on. Tomorrow I get to keep working on another proposal, but with no idea if what I'm writing in proposals is effective.

I'll let you know come January. And again in June.