Hey, gang! The Mod Team is so thrilled at how enthusiastic you’ve already responded to the prompts. You’ve come up with ideas and questions beyond what we could have imagined, and we want to answer a few of those questions here. 

The main thing we need to clarify is the prompts themselves:

There was a little debate about this (and individual Mods may have given differing answers at different times, so apologies) but we all came together to agree that it’s the spirit of a prompt that matters, more so than semantics and technicalities. 

What this boils down to is, if a prompt sparks your imagination, we’re now allowing more wiggle room on being liberal in execution. 

Example: The Faith and Oz squares were intended as character prompts, BUT if you instead want to go for the other definition of faith and have a character exploring a belief structure? That works. If you want to send your characters to the Land of Oz rather than throw in a randomly appearing Daniel Osbourne? That’s fine too!

And if you do decide to go for the character definition, said character does not technically need to be in the drabble, so long as they are intrinsic to it. In other words, someone could be dreaming about that character, or recalling a memory of them. If someone is just talking about them, it needs to be a smidgen more than a two-second reference. Make the mention of them significant. 

What exactly does it mean to be intrinsic or significant? If you were to take out your reference to the character, and the rest of the drabble no longer makes sense, congrats, you’ve made that character significant enough to be intrinsic to the fic working!

For the diary prompt, you could write a diary entry. It does not need to include the word diary.

In the case of the prompt about Buffy complimenting “Spike’s blue shirt,” you could take this as a reference to the blue shirt he wore that one time in Season Seven, or you could have him wear a blue shirt––any blue shirt––at any time or place, and have Buffy compliment it to count.  

For the prompts that consist of a dialogue line, there is now also some wiggle room. E.g. you could have “Oh, bugger,” said Buffy. Or “Oh,” said Buffy. “Bugger!” 

Your fic does not need to be marked as complete by the end of the event (on July 31st). Whatever award you get will depend on whichever level (bronze, silver, or gold) you’d hit by that deadline, but you are free to carry on posting after the event end.

If you're writing a story that has multiple parts/chapters, it needs to follow site rules regarding Spuffy prominence––i.e. it doesn't need to be in each individual chapter, just the fic overall. But if each drabble is self-contained, they must individually follow the Spuffy prominence rule.

If you want your drabbles to form a narrative, and you’ve picked out five prompts to go for silver, but need to add more chapters to make everything work, you can include “filler drabbles” that follow your own, self-selected prompts, in between drabbles that match event prompts. Just clearly label which is which!

Similarly, when using Wild Card prompts, please label them as such. 

Are your drabbles self-contained and not part of a narrative, but you want to post them as “chapters” of a single fic anyway? That’s fine. (Doing so actually makes it easier for us to track, as a Mod Team.)

A couple of people have asked if you can share copies of the drabble board literally showing which squares you’ve ticked off, and yes, you can. Either do this in your story notes or include the screenshot as part of your banner––but do not make it your entire banner, and keep to the recommended banner dimensions. 

That’s all of the questions we can think to answer right now, but if (when) you have more, we’ll likely come back and update this post.