Stories Through The Ages contests
Baby Boomers Plus 2019 Submissions for the 2019 edition are closed. The judges are reading the stories and we will notify all authors of the selections by July 10th. Watch the website for more information.
Submissions for Baby Boomers Plus 2020 will open after the first of the year.
Sightseer Saga: The theme for this contest is travel. It can be travel for a vacation, travel for business, travel to Grandma’s, travel across town - the interpretation is left to the writer. Instead of having a set deadline we will close submissions after 100 entries are received.
Military Experiences: We are asking for stories from soldiers, vets, family members, military personnel - anyone who has a story about the military. It can be a story about being in combat, or training. A story about how it feels to be away from home, or about being left at home. A story about the aftermath of war. We changed this a bit and are going to allow co-authors for this contest. If you have a story to tell but don't think you have the experience to write it, tell it to a child, grandchild or friend and let them help you. We will accept a maximum of 100 entries.
Manuscript Submissions
We will open submissions for manuscripts to consider for publication on August 4, 2019. We will ask for the first 3 chapters or 30 pages. Stay tuned for more information!
Winning by Dan Peavler
As we begin to pick winners for “Stories Through the Ages Baby Boomers Plus 2019”, our third book in the Baby Boomers series, I think about the many stories that were not chosen as a money winner or to be published in one of the books. We have mentioned many times that judging a short story is far from being an exact science. It is the nature of our contest that makes it necessary to pick winners. This doesn’t imply by any means that the stories not chosen are losers.
Vince Lombardi, one of the greatest football coaches of all time, once said “winning isn’t everything, but wanting to win is.” This reminds me of when I coached freshman girls basketball at Littleton High School several years ago. I had played high school and college basketball prior and understood how much I wanted to win as a player. As a coach I had a different perspective. I was much more interested in teaching sportsmanship, teamwork, persistence and the benefit of hard work in reaching a goal. It wasn’t as important for me to win every game.
We won ten games before losing the eleventh. As I prepared to enter the locker room, after the loss, I could hear the girls crying. I was happy that they found this game to be so important. What a teaching opportunity. We sat down and talked about working harder as a team. How proud I was of them for waiting to get to the locker room before showing their disappointment. One of the girls stated, “we thought you would be mad at us for blowing the game.” I answered, “never”.
A person can win at everything by changing their perspective on winning. A long-distance runner doesn’t have to beat anyone, they can win by beating their own times. Completing a short story and sending it to strangers to be judged is a great accomplishment. Each one has its own entertaining and enduring value. We at Living Springs Publishers truly believe that every author who sent us a story is a winner. We hope that doing so helps them be better at their story telling craft.
HONESTY AND INTEGRITY by Henry Peavler
We were talking about honesty and integrity at our last Living Springs Publishers Company meeting, held at the Elevated Egg restaurant, a big step up from the Village Inn, but I wasn’t all that impressed. The eggs are elevated in the sense that they are not plain old fried eggs, they are basted and poached and boiled and several other fancy ways of cooking an egg that I couldn’t even imagine. It would have been bearable except that the Managing Partner forgot the company credit card and I had to pay for my own (and her) French basted egg and French roasted and ground on the spot cup of coffee which you only get one of, unless you want to pay for another, so I may not have been in a good let’s have a meeting frame of mind.
The discussion of honesty, integrity and trustworthiness brought to mind several incidents that I wanted to share with the group, but the rest of the company, especially the younger set, weren’t in the mood to hear about it. Maybe their French basted free-range eggs didn’t set well with them. They wanted to talk about how honest and fair-dealing our company is and how we give you good old fashioned service at a fair value and we tell you up front what your costs will be, if any, and you never pay until the service has been performed. All good and noble sentiments. I made the point that it is better to be honest and fair rather than talk about being honest and fair. Your reputation is built over a period of time based on performance, not what you say you are going to do, but what you actually do. Then you build your clientele on the basis of value given.
Of course, this reminded me of a time back in middle school where this question of honesty almost cost me a friend. It was an incident I wrote about in a book listed on this website somewhere. Mrs. Roper instructed us to write an essay on who we considered to be a hero. It could be anyone. I wrote a beautiful story about my mother being my hero. It was full of pathos, counterbalanced with moments of joy and even humor. It brings tears to my eyes just thinking about it. One of the instructions was that it had to be written in your own words and mine was. I happened to go over to Kenny’s house, the night before the assignment was due, and he was copying his essay out of the encyclopedia. It was about Douglas Macarthur. I mentioned this to Mary Jean Larson and she took it on herself to tell Mrs. Roper. I begged her not to. Kenny would know that I had told her. She said, the only honest thing to do was to tell. I was in a tizzy, it was a conundrum, a problem, a moral tug-of-war about this question of honesty. I don’t remember all the details but a couple of days after the assignments were turned in, Mrs. Roper asked several of us to read ours in front of the class. I was one and so was Kenny. After our performance she began a lecture about honesty and following directions, and you are only hurting yourself if you fail in these matters and all other sorts of adult morality that they tell kids. The bad thing was she said I was a paragon of virtue because mine was obviously written in my own words where-as others, and then she pointed out Kenny specifically, “copied this straight out of the encyclopedia.” Kenny looked at me with an “I’ll never forgive you” kind of look that is imprinted in my memory to this day. I then gave the same look to Mary Jean Larson.
Mary Jean denied that she told Mrs. Roper. I denied that I told Mary Jean Larson and Kenny didn’t believe either one of us. Maybe we hadn’t stored up enough credits in the honesty and integrity department. No doubt, Mrs. Roper knew, without being told, which papers were plagiarized, and which were honest, but we were too wrapped up in the matter to understand that.
Oh yeah, I’m supposed to say that our company, Living Springs Publishers, is honest and full of integrity and we will never do anything wrong or some words to that effect. But, in this case, it is true. Trust me!