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Prizes: 1st Prize - $200
(MSRP) worth of mint, never-read Civil War books.
2nd
Prize - A copy of
each of
Trailhead graphics maps (apx. $100
MSRP)
3rd
Prize - Two mint, never-read Civil War books.
All
submissions should be mailed to
info@civilwarinteractive.com
O.K., just
to get it out of the way, yes there are prizes. Boy, you
people are greedy. But we also know how talented so many of
you are. And we intend to put that to use. In the 15 years
of Civil War Interactive, we have run three writers
contests, and some of the entries we've received from
readers have floored us. Just take a look at the "Articles"
section using the menu in the left sidebar. About 90% of
those were written by you and other readers.
Now with a writing contest, you first need a topic. So let's
take care of that first. The topic of this contest is a
Battle. Easy enough, right. We know all of you have heard of
these battles: Manassas, Shiloh, Fredericksburg, Gettysburg,
Antietam, Chickamauga, Chattanooga, Chancellorsville,
Stone's River, Spotsylvania, Petersburg, Vicksburg, Fredericksburg, Pea
Ridge, Fort Donelson, Franklin or Cold Harbor.
So now you know the topic, but the first thing you need to
do is forget any of the battles listed above.
They are off-limits. The topic of your article cannot be any
of the above battles. Now we know that sometimes battles can
be part of campaigns, so just to be clear, smaller battles
that led to the above battles are allowed. You can't write
about Gettysburg, but Brandy's Station would be O.K. Actual
Battle of Antietam off-limits, South Mountain O.K. So in
short, the smaller battles that led to the larger ones are
allowed. The tentative schedule is
this:
- Today you find out about it and get time to think
about your possible topics.
- April 15th (of course you'll be done with your
taxes, right?) the contest begins. You have one month.
- May 15th at 11:59pm, the contest ends. All entries
must be in by then.
- From May 15th to the 31st, we'll be putting your
articles on the site, hidden from your eyes of course.
- June 1st - all articles are revealed for judging.
Readers have until June 15th to judge them.
- June 17th - winner announced!
Of course there are rules, so here they are:
- Your article must be sent as an attachment in.doc
format. This is generally associated with Microsoft
Word, but if you don't have it you can download Open
Office (
http://www.openoffice.org/ ) for free. It has the
option to save in .doc format. As a last option just
type it directly into an e-mail. Sorry, we don't have
the staff to transcribe typed, paper entries.
- Please type single space with no embedded footnotes.
Use only end-notes. Minimum length is three
single-spaced pages. Maximum is 15 pages. End-notes do
not count towards the length.
- No professional authors allowed. If you've ever
written a book or article for payment, you are not
qualified. If you just write for your round-table
newsletter - no problem.
- CWi retains electronic publication rights for all
submissions. Author retains all other rights.
- We will do no editing. If your syntax, punctuation
or spelling is wrong, that's the way it'll go up and
readers will no doubt take that into account when
judging.
That should get you started. We'll let you know the
prizes in the near future. If we forgot something, or
something isn't clear, let us know at
info@civilwarinteractive.com or ask on the
discussion board at the thread
HERE.
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