It's done! Submitted!
I'm not sure, but I think firstawards was faster this year during the last hour before the deadline, when the site usually has the most traffic.
So, today was spent doing this:
In other words, this year we had three people write different parts of the essay. Since we didn't set an exact character limit for each person (the essay has to be 10,000 characters or less), the essay was 16,000 characters three days ago. This week was editing and revision, but I saved the character cutting for the last day.
So, today I chopped about 6,000 characters out of the essay.
I'll post our essay as a whitepaper tomorrow.