Sure. The whole point of collection is what you said. The editor may love books, but she also works for a business. If this comes to fruition, In the end what will be picked will be the authors and drabbles the editor thinks will produce a book that has a shot of earning money. Of course everyone (or almost everyone) who wrote a drabble will hope to be picked. And of course those who are not picked will feel a moment of disappointment - even as they feel happy to see the others get included. I think we are all human enough for the former. I think we are all adult enough with, and have enough generousity of spirit for the latter to predominate.

TB, I hope you're right, but the truth is, there's a lot of ego wrapped up in writing, and well there should be: no one wants their baby snubbed, and that includes me. There's no negative connotation on the word "ego" there.

What I would do is include sample topics with one or two sample drabbles for each topic, as part of the proposal. The ones I used would be what I considered the most illustrative of writing on the topic. So I'd have to get an acknowledgement from the proposal inclusion drabble writers that use of their work as part of the proposal was okay with them.

Hey deb and amy, I'm kind of terrified that I'm not going to make my deadline simply because I've run out of things to write. Even after beefing up existing work, and with one final essay to be completed today, I'm still 9000 words short. Somehow, I managed to LOSE WORDCOUNT.

I'm freaking out, needless to say. I'm unsure if I should contact my editor and say, "this is due in four weeks, and I don't know what to do, and I think I need to give the money back."

I'm not sure what I can do, or even if it's appropriate to bring it up.

Advice?

Allyson. Do not give up. Do not give the money back. Do not panic. 9,000 words in 4 weeks is not impossible. That is 450 words a day if you take weekends off. You post 450 words a day on the buffista bulletin board all the time.

Question: are you even sure you managed to lose word count? Word's word count can can be funny in a very non-humourous way sometimes.

If the problem is you really have nothing more to say - then how about talking about something else:

1) Do some interviews. 2) Do some essays on peripherally related stuff.

Talking to your editor may be a good idea but not in this mood. You will end up with a submission your editor will like. Terminating the project is not something to discuss. The three possibilities are: you deliver 9,000 more words on deadline. you deliver less than 9,000 more words before dealine. You deliver 9,000 more words after dealine. The last two would need to be discussed with your editor.

If you want, send me what you have. I'm not anything like as great a beta as the others who have already look at it. But the material is new to me, unlike your current betas. Maybe something new will occur to me. (Doesn't mean you should not consult your regular betas as well.)

Allyson, breathe. You haven't run out of words - you've just run out of immediate source ideas.

Ask your friends. We have ideas.

For instance:

As a writer, I know I'd personally love to see a section on the difference in cons. Hell, that ties in with the book's title - but was the scene at, say, the thing you put together for Suze Brockman the same level of intensity and nutso as a Star Trek convention would be?

There's one possibility for a nice beefy essay. And on that one, you can ask your BNFs for quotes and input. Instance: I fell asleep by the pool at BayCon (a scifi/fantasy con; ask Karl T about it, he goes every year) and waking up surrounded by ginormous people in full Klingon battle gear and prosthetic brow ridges. And when I opened my eyes and froze, the biggest guy announced "Good. The human female wakes. We will SING NOW." and proceeded to serenade me with Klingon opera. A couple of months after that, in Minneapolis for World Fantasy, I found myself listening to Neil Gaiman referencing the Siege of Beziers in answer to my challenging the panel on how to write fanaticism from the POV of it being overcompensating for doubt.

So, the difference in the fan bases. It could be a honker of an essay, especially in word count: tell it from the organiser's end, the participating Name end, and the fans' end.

Any help?

Allyson, did you write about that con where one of the fan herders was really snippy to you? I think you were waiting to see Joss. I can't remember the details, but am hoping I'm saying enough that you'll recognize the incident.

Did you write about the Bring Back the Bronze campaign and how (at least for me, and I assume for you) by the end, it was hard to ever care about the Bronze again?

Did you write about camp, or the pool, or the tree house? (I know you can't say much about them particularly or specifically), but there might be something you could say about ex-pat private boards?

Did you write about the Diaspora when The WB/Apollo shut down the official board, and how we were split between jw.net and the Bater?

Did you write about Bronze Safety 'Net?

Did you write about WITTs or birthday Faerie Tales? The Fifth Game? Fan fiction? Slash? RPF?

Were you involved at all in GBAE? Could you write about that?

Could you write about VIP groupees or flesh out your BNF essay with some anecdotes about them?

ETA...

What about PBP vs. Caritas?

What about when you did the auction for [was it PBP or the W&H Annual Revue]? Did you get dumped from one the year after you'd done a kick-ass job?

nodding at Cindy's list

And on some of these, if you're handling them as interviews or at least as "with input from" other people, a lot of the wordcount gets done for you. If I've got anything you can use, it's yours - happy to sign a release.

Drabble:

I’m sitting in my study, surrounded by my things. I try to bring order to the clutter, but most of it doesn’t have a proper place in the room or in my life. Journals with just a few pages written in them, books that I have owned for years and never read, and knick knacks of all sorts. They were supposed to comfort me, to feed a part of me that is hungrier and more hollow than my stomach ever could be, but they don’t, they can’t. Instead, they devour the space around me, making my world a little smaller.

Cindy, I've talked about just about everything on that list, except maybe the Bronze Safety 'Net. It's probably timely due to all the MySpace hysteria.

I appreciate this a lot. It's thinking about answers to questions that makes things start flowing, again. I just sent an e to a friend and said, "ask me something. anything. doesn't matter if it's embarassing."

I would like to maybe write an open letter to the douchebag who was such a shit at Comic Con. That's be hilarious, short, and catharsis all wrapped up in about 800 words.

What did I do with my time?