Tuesday, July 11, 2006

The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest Results for 2006!


This is one of those days I eagerly await all year. If you have never heard of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest before, it is basically about writing the worst single disjointed, run-on sentence with which to begin a book, and is named after Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, the author of the infamous (the first part, at least) line, "It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents--except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.""

Here is this year's grand prize winner (The prize? A pittance.) :


Detective Bart Lasiter was in his office studying the light from his one small window falling on his super burrito when the door swung open to reveal a woman whose body said you've had your last burrito for a while, whose face said angels did exist, and whose eyes said she could make you dig your own grave and lick the shovel clean.

All of the 2006 winners can be viewed here. And here is a list of all the grand prize winners through the years.

I'll end this post with a few of this year's runner-ups:


Sex with Rachel after she turned fifty was like driving the last-place team on the last day of the Iditarod Dog Sled Race, the point no longer the ride but the finish, the difficulty not the speed but keeping all the parts moving in the right direction, not to mention all that irritating barking.

Frank took one look at Tina's moderately shapely legs, her adequate waist, her decent bosom, and her not-unattractive face, and said to himself "Well, hello Miss You'll-Do-Until-Something-Better-Comes-Along!"

Withdrawing his hand from her knee, the English professor stormed, "Ending a sentence with a preposition is the sort of nonsense up with which I will not put," although she had merely looked at his hand and asked, "What are you doing that for?" in a sentence intended to end the proposition.

Yet again Imelda was exacerbated, or at least she assumed she was, as she was never sure exactly what the term meant though when she felt bloated and crampy as she was now, she was pretty sure she was, exacerbated that is.

2 comments:

blogagog said...

Wow, this post reminds me of the time my car broke down in a vapid valley of Nevada's mountainous region when I beheld the roiling clouds of an angry storm bearing down on me as if it were a strange and dangerous creature bent on the destruction not only of myself, but the entire area, and all the while the sanguine sun was slowly disappearing above the oncoming torrent of hellish rain which seemed clearly able to fecundate additional trouble, reminiscent of Hun's final invasion into the last vestige of Roman dominance.


Did I win? :)

Jay said...

Send it in to the official site and see what they say... No limit on number of submissions you can make, the winner this year had sent in over 60.