Story Contest?

I would favour a story competition which didn't set too many limits on creativity. Perhaps all you need is a first line, something which would give limitless possibilities would be best.

She took a deep breath and opened the door
The first train arrived at twenty past six in the morning.
The parcel landed with a dull thud
For some time he gazed intently at her
Once upon a time in a land far away

Sounds like an awesome idea! I'd be in, for sure.

I like the idea as well ... and agree that a specific 'theme' would be appropriate, as well as a limit to the number of words. Famous Russian composer, Igor Stravinsky, once quipped, "the more art is controlled, limited, worked over, the more it is free." His point being that true creativity comes from working with and around constraints.

A short story contest would be fun, but given the slow death of this thread, perhaps not well-participated in.

I think, as originally alluded to, participation is likely to be the problem. I also think part of the problem is that only a very limited number of people who log onto the site have ever glanced at the forum so if we do decide to resurrect the idea of a short story contest we might be better off emailing all the authors we're in contact with to sound them out instead. As someone (JC) once said .. "it's not dead, just resting"

This reminds me, Februs I've talked to a couple of people who've had trouble reading the forum, similar to problems I had: the little window on the page is too small to contain the whole forum posts. If that's common, it might be hurting forum participation ...

If you let me know who's having problems I can modify the menu for them so that the forum opens in a separate browser tab or window. Either that or they could try using Firefox, Chrome or Opera browsers as the forum works fine for me in all of those (I can't speak for the IE browsers as I don't use them). If they are already using one of those browsers then they must have some other software such as a firewall / virus / malware package interfering with normal browser functionality.

Only just found this page, because I don't look at the forum page that often. So saying, I would participate, no matter the rules or restrictions. As for problems accessing the site, I enter through AOL, and have no problems. What's firefox?

In the meantime Katie has announced a story contest with summer holidays as the theme (see her recent post on the forum) .. so you might fancy having a go at that. Firefox is a web browser. -> http://www.getfirefox.com/