Literature Networks Hold an Annual Short Story Competition 2010

The Literature Network will hold an annual short story competition, which will be open to all its members. The rules of the competition are:

1. The stories should be submitted as email attachments in MS Word format and should be minimum 500 and maximum 2000 words and include your Forum names as well. Please send your stories to litnetcompetition@hotmail.co.uk. Please do not post your stories on the Forum!

2. There will be 5 selections (in February, April, June, August and October) throughout the year and only the stories which have been submitted by the first of these months latest will be included in that month's elimination. The five stories which win the each selection will take part in the final voting in November and December.

3. Members can submit only one entry for each selection round. If their story is a winner, they will not be allowed to take part in other selections.

4. The Admin or Moderators are not responsible for editing or correcting of the stories and therefore the writers themselves are required to make sure that there are no grammatical or spelling errors. The submitted copy is final and further corrections by the writers will be disregarded.

5. Please still submit your stories in MS Word.docs. or Rich Text.rtf or Notepad.txt files, but PLAIN TEXT only.

If you want to FORMAT your stories, use the vBulletin forum codes, which can be found here:

http://www.online-literature.com/for....php?do=bbcode

6. Only those members with at least 100 posts by each voting period can submit stories for the competition and vote in the polls.

7. Those who enter the competition agree to keep the information on their identities and stories confidential till the end of that year (only the Admin and Moderators will have access to that information). Those who breach this rule will be disqualified automatically.

8. All entries should be your own original work and not have appeared anywhere else before. Authors retain the copyright rights for the stories submitted to the competition.

9. All submissions must be your sole creative work and written for this particular competition. Anyone found plagiarising will be disqualified from this and all future contests.

10. If one of the 5 entrants selected for the final vote are no longer a member of the site at the time of the final vote, they forfeit their entry and the second place entry for their leg of entries gets bumped to first place.

11. You can withdraw a story during the submission period; however, once the voting starts, no story can be withdrawn. [source: online-literature.com]

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The Alchemist: A Fable about following your dream

Dreams, symbols, signs, and adventure follow the reader like echoes of ancient wise voices in "The Alchemist", a novel that combines an atmosphere of Medieval mysticism with the song of the desert. With this symbolic masterpiece Coelho states that we should not avoid our destinies, and urges people to follow their dreams, because to find our "Personal Myth" and our mission on Earth is the way to find "God", meaning happiness, fulfillment, and the ultimate purpose of creation.

The novel tells the tale of Santiago, a boy who has a dream and the courage to follow it. After listening to "the signs" the boy ventures in his personal, Ulysses-like journey of exploration and self-discovery, symbolically searching for a hidden treasure located near the pyramids in Egypt.

When he decides to go, his father's only advice is "Travel the world until you see that our castle is the greatest, and our women the most beautiful". In his journey, Santiago sees the greatness of the world, and meets all kinds of exciting people like kings and alchemists. However, by the end of the novel, he discovers that "treasure lies where your heart belongs", and that the treasure was the journey itself, the discoveries he made, and the wisdom he acquired.

"The Alchemist", is an exciting novel that bursts with optimism; it is the kind of novel that tells you that everything is possible as long as you really want it to happen. That may sound like an oversimplified version of new-age philosophy and mysticism, but as Coelho states "simple things are the most valuable and only wise people appreciate them".

As the alchemist himself says, when he appears to Santiago in the form of an old king "when you really want something to happen, the whole universe conspires so that your wish comes true". This is the core of the novel's philosophy and a motif that echoes behind Coelho's writing all through "The Alchemist". And isn't it true that the whole of humankind desperately wants to believe the old king when he says that the greatest lie in the world is that at some point we lose the ability to control our lives, and become the pawns of fate. Perhaps this is the secret of Coelho's success: that he tells people what they want to hear, or rather that he tells them that what they wish for but never thought possible could even be probable.

Coelho also suggests that those who do not have the courage to follow their " Personal Myth", are doomed to a life of emptiness, misery, and unfulfillment. Fear of failure seems to be the greatest obstacle to happiness. As the old crystal-seller tragically confesses: " I am afraid that great disappointment awaits me, and so I prefer to dream". This is where Coelho really captures the drama of man, who sacrifices fulfillment to conformity, who knows he can achieve greatness but denies to do so, and ends up living a life of void.

It is interesting to see that Coelho presents the person who denies to follow his dream as the person who denies to see God, and that "every happy person carries God within him". However, only few people choose to follow the road that has been made for them, and find God while searching for their destiny, and their mission on earth.

Consequently, is Coelho suggesting that the alchemists found God while searching for the elixir of life and the philosopher's stone? What is certain is that the symbolism of the text is a parallel to the symbolism and the symbolic language of alchemism, and similarly the symbolism of dreams is presented as " God's language".

It is also symbolic that Santiago finds his soul-mate, and the secrets of wisdom in the wilderness of the desert. The "wilderness" is a symbol that has been used by many great writers e.g.. Austen in "Mansfield Park", and Shakespeare in "King Lear". In the desert, Santiago meets his "twin-soul" and discovers that love is the core of existence and creation. As Coelho explains, when we love, we always try to improve ourselves, and that's when everything is possible. The subject of love inspires a beautiful lyricism in Coelho's writing: " I love you because the whole universe conspired for me to come close to you."

"The Alchemist" is a novel that may appeal to everybody, because we can all identify with Santiago: all of us have dreams, and are dying for somebody to tell us that they may come true. The novel skillfully combines words of wisdom, philosophy, and simplicity of meaning and language, which makes it particularly readable and accounts for its bestselling status.