• Café Life is the Colony's main hangout, watering hole and meeting point.

    This is a place where you'll meet and make writing friends, and indulge in stratospherically-elevated wit or barometrically low humour.

    Some Colonists pop in religiously every day before or after work. Others we see here less regularly, but all are equally welcome. Two important grounds rules…

    • Don't give offence
    • Don't take offence

    We now allow political discussion, but strongly suggest it takes place in the Steam Room, which is a private sub-forum within Café Life. It’s only accessible to Full Members.

    You can dismiss this notice by clicking the "x" box

Service Update One Perfect Sentence Closes Soon – Enter & Vote!

Invest in You. Get Full Membership now.

AgentPete

Capo Famiglia
Guardian
Full Member
Joined
May 19, 2014
Location
London UK
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Just a reminder that this months inaugural One Perfect Sentence contest closes soon – you will find an exact countdown timer on the Colony’s home page, at the top of the right-hand column.

The contest has been designed to be…

  • Easy on your writing schedule – one sentence being less time-consuming to write than a whole short story (*)
  • Spontaneous – you can make as many entries as your muse directs you to
  • Fun – self-evident, hopefully
  • No-rules voting – simply click on the entry or entries that you like. You can even rescind your vote(s) if you so choose – you can’t break the rules because there aren’t any
  • Serious purpose – it’s not entirely frivolous – focusing your mind on expressing the one, perfect sentence is good for your writers’ development (don’t take it as far as Hemingway did, though)

I still haven’t worked out what the prize will be, although I can tell you that the winner will be awarded a badge here, and all the concomitant publicity razzmatazz that goes with it (“I knew her before she won that badge, she was quite ordinary in those days...”)

If you have contest prize ideas, just shout. I’m thinking about a badge for each month’s winner, and then a bigger prize for the yearly winner…

Oh yes, and each contest will only be open “721” i.e. it will begin on the 7th of each month and end on the 21st. So get writing, get voting… you have less than 5 days left!

(*) Not always true, but the intention is there
 
"And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarcely knew at all."

Not the opening line, but soon thereafter.

Perfectly captures the atmosphere of alienation, sets the external viewpoint of our narrator, who is…? :)
 

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