You may not realize it, but today, February 22, 2010, marks one year since I started updating this site with a new fifty-word story every single day!

The very first “regular update” story I posted on the site was called “CPR”. If you look a little further back in the archives, you’ll see a handful of other stories which I had written before I started the site. I put those up to give people an idea of what I was going to be going for.

So at this point there are over 350 fifty-word stories on this episode, the majority of which I wrote, though many have been contributed by some great guest writers. There are also quite a few “nanofiction” stories, which are stories told in less than 140 characters so that they can be posted on Twitter.

Unfortunately, there are a few gaps in the post calendar over the past year. There have been occasional days when I haven’t gotten around to posting a story, especially recently. (In fact, yesterday and Saturday both went story-less, as you may have noticed.) Some of that has been due to busyness with other aspects of my life, and some of it has been due to a bit of waning creativity, I think. In short, I feel like I’ve been burning out very slowly…

So I’m taking a break from new daily updates. Sorry!

My first task, at this point, is going to be going back and filling in all the gaps in the calendar. If you’re following the site on Twitter (@50wordstories), the new stories should still show up there, so you’ll know as they go up. I’m going to try to keep track of the new ones as I write them, too, and then maybe make a news post with links to all the gap-fillers once I’m done.

After that, I have some ideas for maybe compiling the stories into a book, or doing something else interesting with them. I’m going to explore some options. Any feedback along these lines would be greatly appreciated.

Hmm. That was a bit of a dense newsbomb. Time for some more frivolous behaviour: YAYAYAYAYA ONE YEAR WHEEEE!!

I have all of the entries everyone sent in for the Mere 50 Words contest, and there are some really great stories in there!

I apologize that I haven’t chosen winners yet; I’ve been really busy with moving into a new place and then going to staff a summer camp for a week, so I haven’t been able to sit down and start picking favourites yet. I intend to do some reading and choosing this week, and then I’ll reveal the winners as daily updates from Monday to Friday, starting on either September 7 or September 14.

As a reminder, if your story is chosen to win a prize I’ll be contacting you at the email address you used to submit the story. If your story comes up as a winner and the email address you submitted it with isn’t going to work, just send me a note at tim@fiftywordstories.com and we’ll sort things out.

Edit: Submissions for this contest are now closed. Winners will be announced soon!

FiftyWordStories.com is excited to present its first official 50-Word Story Contest: “A Mere 50 Words”!

How to Enter
The contest is open for anyone and everyone to enter. To submit your story for consideration, send it to mere50words@fiftywordstories.com and include the phrase “Mere 50 Words Entry” in the subject line. Please also include your name or a pen name under which the story can be posted.

Submissions will remain open until 11:59 PM, Pacific Standard Time (GMT -8), on August 21, 2009.

Entry Rules
All submitted stories must be exactly 50 words in length, not including the title. (If you are unsure of how to count hyphenated words, numerals, or other nonstandard words, use your word processor’s built-in Word Count function.)

The content of submitted stories should be appropriate for all ages.

There is no limit on the number of submissions per person.

All submissions must be the submitter’s original creation and must not have been previously published in print, online, or in any other format.

The rights to all submitted stories will be handled like regular Guest Writer submissions. For details, see our Submissions page.

Prizes
The prizes are as follows:

Grand Prize – $50 Chapters or Amazon gift card
First Runner Up – $20 Chapters or Amazon gift card
Honourable Mention (x3) - $10 Chapters or Amazon gift card

The winning entries and honourable mentions will be posted to the site after judging has been completed. Other high-quality entries may also be used for future Guest Writer Monday posts.

After the winners have been determined, they will be contacted through the email address their story was submitted by, and arrangements will be made either to have an online gift card purchased for them or to have a physical gift card mailed to them.

Judging
Entries will be judged by Tim Sevenhuysen, the creator of FiftyWordStories.com.

Today I’m starting a new series of stories, titled “The Letter Opener.” The series will follow Herbert Cralston, an office clerk who sets off on an innocuous errand only to have… things happen to him. No spoilers here! (Not a whole lot of preplanning, either.)

Unlike other Storylines on this site, the chapters will go up on sequential days. Part 1 of the story will be five or six 50-word “chapters” long and then I’ll take a break for some one-offs before continuing with Part 2, and so on.

I’d love to hear some comments as the story develops, and if you have any suggestions or opinions about the direction the story should be taking I’m definitely open to reader input!

Enjoy!

There has only been one submission for this week’s Wildcard Wednesday story so far, so I’ve decided to postpone the story for a week to allow for more submissions.

Again, the wordlist for next week’s story is as follows: Noun, First Name, Verb, Verb, Adverb, Noun, Adjective, Last Name, Verb, Exclamation.

If you have any comments or suggestions about Wildcard Wednesday, please leave a comment so I can see what people think of the feature and work to improve it.

Attention, Fifty-Word Fans! There’s a new feature starting up on the stie, something interesting and unique that involves your participation. The feature is called “Wildcard Wednesday,” and it should be a lot of fun!

In the past, I’ve put out calls on Twitter for you to send me a few words, and then I’ve taken those words and incorporated them into a new story. This is similar, but turns the concept on its head. I’ve written a fairly generic “template story,” and I want you to make it interesting by filling in the wildcard words. But here’s the catch: you can’t see the template beforehand!

I’ll take a couple of the submissions that turn out the best and post them to the site this Wednesday. Sound fun? I think so!

Here’s the list of word-types you can fill out for this week’s story, in this order:
Adjective; Place; Adjective; Animal; Verb; Adverb; Noun; Verb; Verb.

You can leave your entry in a comment, or send an @reply to @50wordstories on Twitter (and feel free to tag your submission with #wildcardwednesday if you have enough characters left).

There has been a little bit of confusion over the copyright system as explained on the Submissions page. I’ve clarified some of the language a bit and tried to make the system a bit more transparent.

Essentially, any story you submit to the site, whether via email or in a comment, becomes the property of www.FiftyWordStories.com. If that story gets posted to the site, it is copyrighted by the site under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license. This means that anyone is free to repost the story elsewhere, so long as they give credit to Fifty-Word Stories and to the original author.

However, the story is still the property of Fifty-Word Stories, which means that if you submit a story and don’t put any extra limits on its use then I have the option of using it in a retail compilation or a calendar or however else. (If you don’t want me to use your story that way, then please say so when you submit it. I will definitely accommodate any requests of this nature.)

Also, the site’s ownership of submitted stories is non-exclusive. That means that you are free to repost your submitted stories elsewhere, so long as those other locations do not claim exclusive rights and recognize that Fifty-Word Stories has the right to use the story, as well.

Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns about this process! I’m definitely not out to steal anyone’s work, and I don’t want to confuse anyone about how I intend to use submissions.

Thanks,

Tim

I met up with Nick from www.NameYourTale.com via Twitter and really liked the new microfiction website he and some friends started up. The concept of their site is to take story titles submitted by readers and write 100-word stories based on those titles.

It’s a really cool idea, and you should head over there, read the stories, check out the illustrations that go along with some of them, and submit some titles of your own!

You should especially go over there and read and comment on the story I wrote, which was based on the title “Wrathberries“. It’s wonderful, and I’m not just saying that because I’m the one who wrote it. Ok, fine, that is why I’m saying it. But still.

It’s been a lot of fun writing stories with exactly fifty words, but new frontiers of microfiction are calling. Upon seeing the success of a site like www.sixwordstories.net, I’ve realized that the important part of the term “microfiction” is the prefix “micro”. What people really want are short stories, the shorter the better!

So from today forward, this site will begin posting stories even shorter than fifty words.

The first of these stories will go up shortly. It will consisty of exactly ten words. Where will things go from there? I’m not sure yet, but I know we’re going to test the very limits of this genre known as ”microfiction”.

The observant among you may have noticed a new “Page” linked in the sidebar of the site. The link says “Nanofics on Twitter” and points to this page.

What’s on this page is a live feed of Twitter posts tagged #nanofic. This means that you can go there and see some of the recent NanoFic stories that people have been sharing via Twitter. You can even login to your Twitter account on the page and write a NanoFic of your own! (Just be sure to include the #nanofic hashtag so other people can see your nanofic once you’ve posted it.)

For more information about what NanoFic is and how it works, see my earlier post here.

The Twitter plugin is provided by Tweetizen.