Evening,

A few months ago I presented a paper at a conference and the organizers decided they would publish some in an online journal. They asked the speakers to send an abstract explaining how they would expand upon the paper they had presented at the conference. I sent mine in and it was accepted.
At the time I wrote the extended abstract I was playing around with some new ideas for my thesis and I decided I would extend my paper by incorporating one of these ideas, instead of using the already-written chapter which my original paper had come from. I hope you're still with me!
The problem is that since writing the second abstract I have realised I didn't really have anywhere to go with these 'new' ideas and have abandoned them for now.
My question is: is it ok to submit an article which differs in a few ways from the abstract I handed in? It is due in a few days and I don't really have time to try and work out how to incorporate the things I said I would. Also, it is only to be 6,000 words, including footnotes, which really doesn't give me enough space to add those bits in.

Any thoughts? I hope I've made sense!

Hi KC

If I got this right, the article you're planning to submit is the original paper that your conference paper came from? Then you wrote a whiz-bang abstract, which now doesn't work, and so are going back to the original? If this is the case, I think it's fine to go back to the first paper, and maybe you could rewrite the abstract which goes with it. I've done this, and included an explanation when I've sent it in, and it's been fine. 

Hi Sue,

Yes that's exactly it, well done for making sense of my post! Glad to hear it should be ok, and good point about re-writing the abstract.

Many thanks.