Welcome

Thanks for visiting! Confiction.org is a community site for short stories that adhere to various literary constraints, ranging from the well-known (anagrams, acrostics, palindromes) to the obscure and arbitrary (see the current list). Read more in our FAQ. You might also like to have a look at a random story.

Latest stories RSS

The Stranger by Sean Taras (It was very hot outside when I shot him.)
Onion by Sean Taras (You always make me cry, my darling, so lovely you are. Your firm, ripened body gives off an ivory...)
An empty station. by Bianca Doe (Ten feet away, a man squats on his haunches & fumbles through his zippered jeans. Seconds later, a...)
thEn EvErything changEd. by Bianca Doe (The axe fell. Everything changed suddenly, then eventually. She never goes quietly. She...)
Calliope's Curse by Claire Webber (Always angry, always aware. Before basic banalities, before… Cancel. Delete. Erase. Forget...)
or see two hundred and ninety more...

Highly-rated stories

Running Metaphor! by Anastasia Kolobrodov (two comments) (She had already attempted falling asleep. She'd tossed, turned, rolled around, fluffed the pillow...)
Liquid Metaphor by Mike Keith (two comments) (I was flying towards hell - or, put a different way, the adjoining suburb and the asylum which lay...)
Excerpt from "On the Use of Mirrors in the Game of Chess" by Milo Temesvar by Greg Bennett (four comments) ( For the second game I moved the mirror. When she arrived, she looked nervously at the mantlepiece...)
Alpha Indigo by Joe Halliwell (one comment) (It's cool and calm in Mountvista robot lab, a sharp contrast to San Fransisco's urban smog and...)
Woodland flirtation by Semyon Semyonovich (Kissing in a wood, my hands push into a trail of knots laid out across his broad back, now a...)

Latest challenges

Lipogram (seventeen stories) (Your lipogrammatic submissions should avoid a symbol that I will playfully signal by noting that it...)
Molecular (one story) (Your task is to compose stories using the symbols of chemical elements as your lexical atoms...)
Norbury acrostic (four stories) (Compose a story, where the first letter of every word follows the sequence in the following excerpt...)
A ghostly interrogation (two stories) (You and a lover are engaged in an argument about whether one of you is alive. One of you believes...)
Lightless and bound (two stories) (You are imprisoned in a room with no light. There is no door, but you can occasionally hear the...)
or see thirty-seven more...

News

The Lost Book microfiction competition - Edinburgh's City of Literature guys are running a microfiction competition which revolves around a story started off by Jasper Fforde. There is the possibility - I think - of appearing at the Ed Book Festival if you are successful. But I could be wrong about that. http://thelostbook.net/get-involved/microstory-competition/
Registration now possible! - Now is the time to take the opportunity by the horns and try out one of our many challenges. We know you want to! For those who have tried to register in the past, a small technical hitch has been fixed that will allow registrations to work...
Confiction.org - After many, many long months of loneliness on the great barren expanse of the non-web, we return! This site is now officially called confiction.org and inherits all that was once constrained.org. If you were once a user of constrained.org, all your user details should still be the same.
Underground map - Here's a witty anagrammatical take on the London tube map.
We reappear, cautious but ready to constrain - The good ship constrained.org returns, after a brief sojourn in the Bermuda triangle of cyberspace. Apologies to those who may have missed their footing when trying to board.
or see twenty-four more...

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