Glimmer Train contest:

A little late (deadline is January 2d); details below

http://www.glimmertrain.com/

Prizes:

• 1st place wins $2,000, publication in Glimmer Train Stories, and 20 copies.
• 2nd-place: $1,000 and possible publication.
• 3rd-place: $600 and possible publication.

Results post on February 28, 2010. Winning story will be published in Issue 78.

Other considerations:

• Open to all writers, all themes.
• Reading fee: $20 per story.
• Word count range: 2,000 – 20,000. (Don’t worry: A great 2,000 word story can compete against a great 20,000 word story. It’s the story that counts.)

Q

Writing exceptionally well …

Horace

“You will have written exceptionally well if,  by the skillful arrangement of your words, you have made an ordinary one seem original”

From Horace (65-8 BC) Ars Poetica.

Written? In Horace’s time? The original text in Latin is:

Dixeris egregie notum si callida verbum reddiderit iunctura novum. The verb is “to say”, not “to write”. This was the age of oratory, studied and practiced as a component of rhetoric – the art of  persuasion, of moving an audience, with language.

William Shakespeare

And, as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen

Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name

William Shakespeare (1564-1616) in Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Q