Life is what happens when you're busy with other stuff

I sat down last weekend to work on my full-length Mojave, on which I have not yet broken 20k (that's pretty much why I didn't do NaNo this year...between work and life, I knew it wasn't going to happen)...it was the end of a crap day capping off a crap week and, being a moody sort of person, I threw my big project aside to do something a little more edgy to vent some steam. The end result was a story I just finished tonight called Filtered White Light; I am obviously trying to shake off having read McCarthy's The Road this month, and this story reflects that: stark, dimly lit, short sentences, and, although there is some dialogue, not a goddamn quotation mark in the whole story. Risky to try and sell something formatted like that, but it seemed to work for the flow...but, I guess I'll find out if I'm overstepping my current state of development based on if anyone wants to read it. My bigger fear is if the story itself was too subtle, but I guess I'll find that out, too.

It was, at least, an interesting exercise to see how the story flow changed with minimal punctuation (I added and removed and re-added and re-removed the quotations about six times)...you really have to try harder to make it friendly on the eyes, but if you strip it down enough to make the dialogue stand out , the starkness of the format kind of weaves itself into the story, and that kind of takes it all in a certain direction.

I have one story (Mojave) in the hopper and five in the field. At least one I should be hearing back on soon, I hope. I passed the first round and was told I should hear "in a month or so", and today is like 6 1/2 weeks, which I guess is still within that range.

Am I justified in being hesitant/nervous about pinging an editor for a status? Is that considered...rude? or pushy?