We’ve had some interesting incoming links recently. I think some professors must be mentioning it in their classes because in addition to a lot of .edu submitters, there are a number of .edu referrers in the logs (usually password-protected pages, though). One such referral came from Wheeling Jesuit University, of all places. If you’re a professor who is using One Sentence in their class, drop me a line.

Also got a nice referral from Russia recently. Alexander was kind enough to send me a translation of what he wrote:

“One Sentence is a literature project, with very simple rules: participants write stories in just one sentence. I remember an anecdote:

A university creative writing class was asked to write a concise essay containing the following elements:

1. Religion
2. Royalty
3. Sex
4. Mystery

The prize-winning essay read: ‘My God,” said the Queen, “I’m pregnant. I wonder who did it!”

Not one sentence, but mighty impressive, no less!

We’re less than a week away from Halloween, so it’s time to submit your best Halloween-themed true stories. Get them in between now and 11:59pm (eastern) on Halloween and tag them “halloween” (lowercase).

I’ll pick a winner–yes, it’s totally subjective–and will send said winner a prize. What is the prize? Leftover Halloween candy, of course! We always buy too much around our house, and this way it won’t tempt us in the days following The Feast of the Dead. What a prize, huh?

You can follow along here.

(Pumpkin image by way of Bloom Petals.)

One of the other reasons a submission may be glossed over for a while is that it doesn’t include any suggested tags. True, it is an “optional” field and often I’ll fill a few in myself if an entry comes in without any, but I’m much more likely to quickly approve a story if it has well categorized tags (even if it’s just one, like “love”). If tags confuse you, just think of a couple of keywords that describe or categorize your sentence well. And look at the stories page under “tag cloud” to get an idea of what others are using.

The site becomes a lot richer when the stories are well-tagged.

As a side note, some really great submissions have been coming in recently. Keep ‘em coming… I’m catching up, slowly but surely!