Game of Chance by Leith Babian

So far I have seen the racing in America, Europe and Asia. To me, nothing beats Australian racing, especially in spring when it’s in full swing. Spring racing here in Melbourne is now a world recognised racing event. It’s got it all: the bright, colourful atmosphere and some of the world’s best horses competing, the highlight being the Melbourne Cup, one of the biggest parties in the world. Furthermore, unlike most other parts of the world, we have the bookies, and the horses race on turf as nature intended.

Anyone who works in horse racing can tell you that it has its ‘ups and downs’. They will also tell you that there are more downs.  When things are not going so well it sometimes feels like a disaster-filled love affair, you know, it’s bad for you but you keep going back!  On the other hand, racing can bring you the most joy that you are ever likely to have even if you are only a little fish in the pond. I have some first-hand experience of both. I’ve had luck, good and bad but luck’s all about your perspective I figure. Was I unlucky I didn’t reach the pinnacle in my chosen field, or was I lucky that I got to do it at all and didn’t kill myself or anyone else along the way?


Winning is an addiction. I remember towing a horse to Murwillumbah for a $2000 race after having won a much bigger race three days earlier. I gave my horse a good chance but really thought it was going to be anticlimactic straight after winning a $30.000 race. My bank balance had been diminishing since I’d started to train. Horses mostly don’t pay their way by winning these little races; it hardly covers the feed bill. However, my horse duly won his race and I found that I got just as big a thrill out of the win. I love winning. In horse racing, it is everything!


From stable hand, through jockey, trainer, trackwork rider, mug punter and back, I love being around the horses and racing. I consider them man’s best friend. Call me biased but look at what they give humans: pleasure, employment and even therapy are some of the things horses are used for. In every country that I’ve ever visited, I have seen at least one statue or artwork of horses somewhere. They were and still are an integral part of building nations and they even went to war along with our soldiers. In Australia, the horse racing industry is always in the top five of employers. We owe a lot to horses, more than we can repay.

(Extract from a memoir.)

Points on presentation, style, grammar and punctuation.
(Consider these points when writing for competition and publication.)

Style

Whether you are entering competitions or submitting manuscripts for publication, it is best to keep formatting to a minimum. It can take editors hours to de-format paragraph indentations etc.
Many publishing houses have their own ‘house’ style, and it is as well to check on this.
The following is from Five Bells, which publishes essays and reviews as well as poetry.

Please use single inverted commas for quotations within your text and double for quotations within quotations. Quotations longer than three lines should be offset from the text and presented without quotation marks.

Italicise poem titles as well as book titles.

Commas and full stops at the end of a quoted phrase go inside the closing quotation mark.

If there are notes, endnotes are preferred, not footnotes.

Please leave a single space after the full stop at the end of a sentence, before beginning the next sentence.

Paragraphs are to the margin, not indented, with a double space between paragraphs.

Submitting your text in this format will save the typesetter hours of work, and increase your chances of publication.

While publishing houses will differ slightly with house style, this is fairly standard.

As editor, I standardized font and paragraph indents. Again, each publishing house will vary slightly in this. I took a recent book of short stories from a major publishing house as my guide. Some of you may object to what I have done; which is to indent each new paragraph and speech lines three spaces. Some of you make a paragraph virtually out of each sentence; these have been put together where appropriate to form longer paragraphs. Some of you use a double space to mark paragraphs; from a publisher’s point of view, this takes up too much paper. Where a shift in the story takes place, I have inserted a double space between the paragraphs. I have compromised between what I would prefer and what the majority of you are doing.

With regards to font, I quote Zadie Smith, editor of The Book Of Other People.

There is, however, an element of their (the submitting writers) character that has been removed: the fonts. Publishers standardize fonts to suit the style of the house, but when writers deliver their stories by e-mail, each font tells its own story. There are quite a few writers in this volume who use variations on the nostalgic American Typewriter font (and they are all American), as if the ink were really wet and the press still hot. We have two users of the elegant, melancholic Didot font (both British), and a writer who centres the text in one long, thin strip down the page, like a newspaper column (and uses Georgia, a font that has an academic flavour). Some writers size their text in a gigantic 18. Others are more at home in a tiny 10. There are many strange, precise and seemingly intimate tics that disappear upon publication: paragraphs separated by pictorial symbols, titles designed just so, outsized speech marks, centred dialogue, uncentred paragraphs, no paragraphs at all. It seems a shame to lose these idiosyncratic layouts and their subtle effects. Anyway: I hope what remains will satisfy.

‘Normal’ font and size 14 is suitable for submitting to most competitions and publications. Double spacing is unnecessary with a larger font, and a pain to edit once it has been formatted in.

All capitals in the title is no longer necessary. Do not ever use capitals throughout your work. Nobody will read it if you do.

Do not underline words for emphasis. You can italicize them (the preferred option for most publishers), use bold font or capitals.

Do not put full stops at the end of every line in poetry. If you are punctuating your poem, do it as you would a normal sentence, albeit one that is spread over several lines and occasionally stanzas.
Don’t put a full stop after speech in a sentence if you are going to continue the sentence; use a comma.

If speech comes at the end of a sentence, it doesn’t need to start on a new line; and it doesn’t need to begin with a capital letter.

Mr, Mrs, no longer necessarily have full stops; neither do a person’s initials, as in AH Collins. If you decide to put them in – and it is still technically correct to do so – be consistent.

It’s not okay, ok ,o.k. or O.K. – it’s OK!

Nan, Nana, Pop, Grandpop, Gran, Grandma, Gandad all have capital letters when they are used as proper nouns. (Gran gave me a bag of lollies.) If they are used as a common noun they do not have a capital letter. (His gran gave him a bag of lollies.)

Don’t use the & sign in prose unless, say, it is part of a sign or a title you are quoting (Withnail & Co.) Spell and out!

Numbers are usually written out too, as in her sixty-eighth birthday, by the weary age of thirty, or She put ten apples in the bowl. Dates as in 1948, 1862, are not; and the 21st Century seems to be acceptable; but most prose writers will write April the fourteenth rather than April 14th. This is a rather vague issue that I could not obtain specific guidelines for; it probably depends on the house style of the publisher you are submitting to.

1950s and 1960s etc. do not have an apostrophe before the s.

Do not use a row of hyphens to indicate a lapse of time (especially a row of off-centre hyphens!) or a row of dots. Standard ellipses are three dots, used in the centre of the page; these are used to indicate the omission of words in a sentence, too.

If you are using italics for speech or quotes, be consistent. Some of you begin using italics and then slip back into quotation marks in the story. If you use italics then you don’t need quotation marks.
Double or single quotation marks are both correct current usage; for standardization I have used single marks in this anthology.
Note Five Bells house style.

Till doesn’t have an apostrophe when used in the middle of a sentence (wait till six o’clock); you should not use it at the start of a sentence, where Until is still more appropriate.

New South Wales and the names of other states are normally written out in prose.

Don’t use am and pm in prose unless you are doing it for a particular effect. Write morning and afternoon or evening.

It’s or Its? Its is the possessive form of it (The bottle has lost its top; my car is in for its pink slip): it has no apostrophe s. It’s is a shortened form of it is or it has: it’s raining, it’s been an awful day.

Some of you use slang speech, brogue or the vernacular to good effect. Be careful, though, that it makes sense to your reader; it did not make sense to me until I inserted an apostrophe so that I could recognize it as a shortening of so as – so’s. Be consistent in punctuating common speech.

When using quotation marks, always put the full stop, question mark or exclamation mark before the closing quotation mark. It is incorrect to place an additional full stop outside the closing quotation mark.
She merely smiled and asked ‘where have you been hiding all this while?’
‘You deliberately lied to me.’
The man behind me shouted ‘Stop that racket!’

Our language is constantly changing, which makes it difficult to keep up with what is acceptable to publishers and what isn’t. My advice is to have a good current writer’s manual on hand – I can recommend the Penguin Writer’s Manual – and a comprehensive up-to-date dictionary. Do not trust your computer’s spell check! Become your own editor. It’s the best thing you will ever do for your chances of winning competitions and/or publication.

Compiled by Anna Buck when editing the new anthology from Writers of the Far South Coast