So just to confirm— it is okay to edit a little after the due date, as long as it hits word count/etc?

Mmmm. Yes and no. Edit as in fixing commas and rewording here and there: fine. Edit as in add whole entire scenes or do a total redraw because your beta hated it: Less than ideal.

We're on an honour system here, but my perspective is that if your work is an uncoloured sketch or a story that's not beta read and is missing an ending, and you totally think you can finish it in the next six days, but then (forfend against it) get the flu/end up working double shifts all week/have a sick aunt to look after, and don't finish it after all, your recipient gets an unfinished thing on the day of the reveal. Thus follows emergency pinch hits and bad feelings all around.

If, in the next five hours, you can't have something finished to the point where you'd be happy to get it as a gift, I'd honestly be happier to have a default now then have a scramble on the day the archive is supposed to open.

THANK GOODNESS FOR TINKERING TIME! I have a fic in, not a placeholder, but I do need to perfect it. Thank goodness for pinch hits.

Astonishing everyone, I actually finished with like a week to spare. Usually it's me that's tinkering with the damn thing last minute.

Few more pinch hits still out there. Hopefully those get claimed soon.

I just submitted, but I realise that I'm after 5pm PST - sorry, I've been offline all day and had wrongly assumed the submission time was later. I understand that it may have been sent to pinch hit, but hopefully the recipient will still get a chance to see the story.

I defaulted you, and then undefaulted you when I saw your story come in. You should be able to marry them up by editing and clicking the fulfil assignment thing.

It seems to be marked as fulfilled. Thanks so much for letting me know!

Looks good on my end too. Whew.

I cleverly underestimated the amount of verbiage it would take to bring mine to a satisfactory conclusion and kind of sort of almost doubled its length at the last second :\ Well, on the bright side, perhaps my recipient will receive two stories as a result...

I don't know what your AO3 user name is, but I probably just defaulted you. Maybe leave a bit more of a margin in the future.

You can say that again! What a way to break a writing-fast.

Thank heavens for tinkering time. I don't trust my proof-reading skills six hours before a deadline. There's always a few typos that get through, or a missing word or period or something.

Yeah. I don't trust my brain to proof read pretty much at all! Extra time to get some rough edges off is goo.