A story goes through several phases on its way through CC. We have a queue system so your story will go to the back of the queue when you submit it and it will eventually go into review.
When you first submit your story it will be put into the upcoming section of the queue. You will be told on the submit story receipt page when it is scheduled to come up for review. Typically this will be 2 weeks or so (for the newbie queue it is different; your story always goes up for review the next Wednesday).
During the time that the story is in the upcoming section (sometimes referred to as being "in the queue"), Standard members cannot revise their stories. Premium and Premium Gold members can, however, change their their story as much as they want.
Finally the story moves from the upcoming section and goes to up for review. You will receive an email when that happens and it will also be highlighted in the notification center at the top of the page as well as in your Reminders box on the front page.
Your story will be up for review for a period of seven days, Wednesday to Wednesday.
During this time, both Standard members and Premium members cannot touch their stories. Premium Gold members are able to revise their stories during this period with a few restrictions (they cannot change the story layout but fix individual paragraphs).
When the review period ends your story will be moved over to Older submissions. At this point you will be able to revise the story. Other members can now also read all crits on the story. You should not expect any more crits on your story after it has been put into older submissions.
When your story becomes really old, CC might archive it which will not make it behave any differently than other stories in the older submissions category and you can always bring it back from the archive.
If a story has inappropriate content or there is some other problem with it the administrators can reject it. It will still show up in your story list but your credits have been refunded and no one else will be able to see the story.
Once your story has reached Older submissions you can delete the story. This will remove all the story text but the story 'container' will still be on CC with the crits you have received attached to it. No one but the author can look up a deleted story.