about this site
It works thus: you send in a submission, a story, poem, whatever. It gets published here. The catch is that no submission can be longer or shorter than one hundred words. Our editorial policy is fairly lax, which means that if you simply submit an expletive repeated one hundred times, we'll ask you to justify its literary worth or face censorship.
The underlying logic being that one never gets as much time as one might like to write interesting unprosaic prose. Hence, the idea is to keep all stories very short, and in doing so, encourage creativity. The ideal, by extension, is to write one story every day.
Submission rules
All submissions must follow three rules:
All submissions must be exactly one hundred words in length, excluding the title. No more, no less. And please don't try and put half your story in the title!
Only one submission per person per day (it's really quite addictive). Although we have been fooled into accepting two…
Each submission should be internally readable. It is fine if you want to have a long story consisting of several hundred-word shorts, but each short must be internally consistent and readable, and only one short can be submitted each day.
Pictures can also be submitted. We will post them. However, pictures are reputedly worth a thousand words, so they have to be very small pictures. Each image should be sent with a title. The current rule is that pictures should have a total area of exactly 100000 pixels -- that's 500x200, 667x150, or 1000x100, for instance.
Economy and style. Elegance. You get the notion. (Or, of course, for some, sophomoric and maudlin; angry.)
Why xxx?
It's hard to set the mood in one hundred words. So we're going to go out on a limb here and say there is nothing explicitly pornographic on this website.
All x's are not made equal, and in this case, the outer two x's are supposed to be Roman numerals, the centre x a multiplication sign. Simply put, ten by ten.
Something is broken
If you find anything which seems to be broken, please email us and tell us.
Similar concepts
oneword is a similar site -- you get sixty seconds to write about one word. Another interesting and very analogous site is 100 words: the idea is similar, entries of one hundred words, but they are published in one-month (per person) batches. Let me know if you find any others.
Various writers have also (often famously) explored similar concepts. Yasunari Kawabata has an excellent book of short stories, entitled Palm-of-the-Hand Stories; Neil Gaiman called hundred-word stories "drabblets".