We know so many of you are excited for our first-ever drabble event, since you voted for it a year ago, so here are some things you’ll need to know. (Or if this is the first time you’re hearing about our drabble event, please see our announcement post here.)

Firstly, I will draw your attention to the gorgeous banner above and the beautiful awards below, all designed by scratchmeout.

The event skin, conveniently titled “Drabblemania,” is now live. You can preview it from the homepage, like so:

To select it as your default skin, (rather than just using it temporarily) visit member preferences, set “Drabblemania” as your default and hit “Submit” at the bottom of the screen.

(Also, big hand to cawthraven who designed her very first site skin; it’s beautiful)

Awards, Drabbles, and Awards for Drabbles

As promised, there are Bronze, Silver, and Gold participant awards alongside our standard Beta, Commenter, and Artist achievements.

To win the bronze award, you must complete a single prompt––any prompt––from the official event boards, and post your work to the site during the month of July, ticking the box to indicate it’s part of the event. (More on this in a minute.)

EF defines a drabble as a work of 1,000 words or under. If you’re submitting artwork with no words, obviously don’t worry about this. If you’re submitting something with both words and pictures, the word cap applies. 

Minimum word count: 50 words. (Because if a prompt is, for example, “Spuffy get ice cream” you will need to do a little bit more than writing, “Spike and Buffy went for ice cream,” to qualify.) 

And yes, we know that sometimes the site word count will not exactly match that of Microsoft Word and/or Google Docs, so there will be a little wiggle room to account for this. 

To win silver, cross off five prompts from a single board in a line, going any direction i.e. horizontally, vertically, or diagonally. If your line goes through the ‘wild card’ square (previously called ‘free space’), you can write a drabble on a prompt of your choice or use another prompt from any of the boards to count for that square.

The three prompt boards will go live at midnight on 1st July, site time (currently GMT). You can always check what the site time is under the Shoutbox on EF’s homepage. 

To get a gold award, you must cross off all of the twenty-five prompts on a single board. Completing twenty-five prompts across all three boards is cool, and totally allowed if that’s where your muse takes you, but it won’t equal gold. 

On that note: this is supposed to be fun, so if you get inspired to write three drabbles or thirty-three, go for it. If the added challenge of trying to hit award targets reminds you too much of assignments and stresses you out, just ignore that part and enjoy whatever shinies you get when the time comes. 

You can post any time from 0:00 on July 1st to 23:59 on July 31st, during which a tick box will appear on the ‘add a new work’ page, as demonstrated in the screenshot below:

Note: if you’re submitting an artwork-only piece that is also for the event, just click the event box and not the artwork box. The way the site is set up, you can only have one ticked. If you’ve accidentally ticked the wrong one and need the Mod Team to change it, reach out and we can do that for you. 

Works that are part of the event will all appear together on the page linked here, and they will also get a little quill icon appearing beside the title, as shown in the example here: 

Also, we have gotten a few questions about whether event-specific content can be posted in other spaces over the duration of the event. At Elysian Fields, the answer is always YES. It's your work and your decision about what you want to do with it. You will not be penalized for sharing far and wide.

Finally, for the sake of the Mods issuing awards, please state which prompt you’re answering in your chapter notes. And please, please, please credit your betas and/or banner artists in your story notes so they get credit for the event. 

If you have any questions, let us know!

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Edited to Add: For previous events, you had to write fifteen comments of at least fifteen words each to win the commenter award, but for this event––because the focus is on having smaller things in greater amounts––the requirement is twenty-five comments of at least five words.