What’s five-by-five and lots of fun? That’s right, our next event! 

Way back at the end of July last year, when we were wrapping up Mystery Month 2022, we asked you all to vote on whether to keep Mystery Month as an annual thing or switch it out for a drabble event. What the majority of you did instead was pick a third option, in which we’d alternate between a drabble event and Mystery Month each year. 

So, Mystery Month will be returning for July 2024, but for July 2023 we are so excited to bring Drabblemania to life! We’ve workshopped the specifics a little since the first announcement, and can now reveal the plan as such: 

The Mod team is going to take unused story prompts that the membership submitted for Mystery Month last year, and create three prompt boards. Imagine Bingo boards with five squares across the top and five down, making twenty-five squares in total (where the middle one is a free space). 

To take part, you must write a fic (or create some Spuffy fan art) based on at least one of the prompts. Drabbles are usually defined as stories of 100 words or less, but here at Elysian Fields, they need to be under 1,000 words to qualify. 

If you write one drabble, you get a bronze award. If you’re able to mark off a line of five prompts (in any direction), you get a silver award, and if you’re able to blackout an entire prompt board, you win gold. We’re not planning a platinum award for completing all three prompt boards, but if someone actually manages to do it, we’ll make sure you get the recognition you deserve. 

Drabbles can be entirely self-contained, or interconnected. As such, you can post the drabbles written for this event as one shots or as a multi-chaptered fic, so long as those “chapters” are individual drabbles that are under the 1,000 word limit. 

There will of course also be awards for commenters, artists, and betas. 

Any questions, let us know!