From: Paul Andinach Subject: ADRICS 2000 - Best Drabble Date: Thursday, 18 May 2000 22:56 Paul Gadzikowski has already claimed that "If brevity is the soul of wit, the authors of the pieces nominated for Best Comedy Short Fiction are the soul of alt.drwho.creative wit". Where this leaves alt.drwho.creative's thriving population of drabble writers, I don't like to speculate... Most of those of you who are bothering to read this will be aware that a drabble is a story exactly one hundred words long. Many of you, perhaps, will not be aware that the story exactly one hundred words long is a recognised artform, like a longer and more prosaic form of haiku. Thanks to a high school English class, I was writing Doctor Who drabbles years before I knew what a drabble was. Perhaps, you might say, there is a difference between drabbles and "microstories"; perhaps microstories have to be about arty things like meditating under cherry trees. But you'd be wrong. The example microstories we were shown in high school, written by one of Japan's masters of the form, included a meditative character sketch and an obscure story with an unhappy ending, but also an action-filled drama and a humorous story involving cocks. The nominees for the 2000 Adric Award for Best Drabble, written by alt.drwho.creative's masters of the form, include a meditative character sketch, an obscure story with an unhappy ending, and a number of humorous pieces which have nothing to do with cocks *at all*. Fourth runner-up: "Unsolved" - Bradley Keith Willis Third runner-up: "So the costume was HER idea" - Scott Matthewman Second runner-up: "The Infinity Doctors" - K. M. Wilcox First runner-up: "Scenes that will never happen" - Helen Fayle And the award for Best Drabble goes to... "The Dance" - Rebecca K. Dowgiert