Submission guidelines

Hurro my fine feathered friend! Use the form you see on the right to submit your two sentence story.

When you submit a story “This post was submitted by …” will appear underneath it. You can use a pseudonym if you want or your real name. If you’re worried that your boss might discover you’ve been writing stories about zombie dating etiquette then use a fake name.

The Two Sentence Story Competition!

Well, the first two sentence story competition is finished!  Check out the winners here.

I will be running competitions in the future so this is another reason you should put a story up on this site! Every story ever put up for all time is eligible for winning future competitions.

How long can a two sentence story be?

Using hyphens and semi-colons and brackets and all kinds of punctuation craziness it is possible to write a massively long two sentence story (kinda like how this sentence is quite long (long as in nested brackets (which are quite fun))) – and you can do this if you like. My general rule is I’ll be counting full stops. There should be only two.

Update: ok, try to keep the stories short. Also, I suggest if you are using semi-colons you look up their proper definition and usage.  It is incorrect to use them as a faux full stop. Rock on.

But the stories have titles which means it’s like an extra sentence …

I knew you were clever the moment you came in. Yes, it is possible to write a two sentence story and then give it an incredibly clever title which serves as a third sentence or a comment on the story or a twist or whatever. I don’t care if you do this but try not to make the titles longer than a few words. There is no hard and fast rule on it and if it’s cool then I’ll let it go.

Remember: make it two sentences.

No stories of more than two sentences, random strings of letters or spam stuff. I don’t censor stories so feel free to write about whatever topic you like. Don’t use the full names of friends in the story or anything like that because I won’t publish it if I suspect you are. I don’t share your email address.  If you want your website to appear, submit it in the form. Tag the stories as you go with what you feel is appropriate.

The Money and Copyright Bit

One day this website might get a publishing deal or something else that generates money from the content. I don’t want to own your stories but neither do I want to have to negotiate permissions or royalties with all the various people who might submit stories (that’s a lot of emails to send out).

So here is the deal: By submitting a story to Two Sentence Stories you are giving Two Sentence Stories a royalty-free perpetual license to use, modify, reproduce, publish, distribute, and exercise all copyright and publicity rights with respect to that story. This includes storing it, incorporating it in any media now known or later developed, including published books. If you don’t want to grant Two Sentence Stories these rights then do not submit your story to this site.

You can still publish your two sentence story wherever you like in any form but you’ve granted a perpetual license for me and this site to do the same.

Want to illustrate a two-sentence story or put the text over weird photos or something like that?

Cool.  Send me an email with the jpeg attached. Nothing over 1 mb please. Send me a link to your site as well. Remember, if you are using images from Flickr and similar that you should only use Creative Commons licensed images which allow commercial uses. If it’s not your picture and you don’t have permission then don’t send it to me. If you have to attribute the owner of the image, please send me the link so I can do so. If you see your picture up here and you didn’t give permission for that to happen – send me an email with some kind of proof that it is your image and you control the copyright to it.

How many stories can you submit?

As many as you like. Just make sure you put them into the form one at a time. Don’t put five stories in one post and then submit it because the submission monkey will lose his mind.

How long will it take before my story is up?/Will you notify me?

The stories should go up as soon as you hit “send”. If you click “notify me” then you’ll get an auto-reply advising your story has been published. You can use this link to link directly to your story.

Got any questions about anything?

Send me an email. About anything. Seriously. If your question is a common one then it might end up in a FAQ.

cheers and happy reading and submitting,

Mat

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