It was a dark and stormy night...
- From: "Random" <randomiez@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 1 Aug 2005 03:04:00 -0700
A 43-year-old quantitative analyst for Microsoft Great Plains is the
winner of the 23rd running of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. A
resident of Fargo, North Dakota, McKay is currently visiting China,
perhaps to escape notoriety for his dubious literary achievement.
His entry, extolling a subject that has engaged poets for millennia,
may have been inspired by Roxie Hart of the musical "Chicago."
Complaining of her husband's ineptitude in the boudoir, Roxie laments,
"Amos was . . . zero. I mean, he made love to me like he was fixing a
carburetor or something."
An international literary parody contest, the competition honors the
memory (if not the reputation) of Victorian novelist Edward George Earl
Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873). The goal of the contest is childishly
simple: entrants are challenged to submit bad opening sentences to
imaginary novels. Although best known for "The Last Days of Pompeii"
(1834), which has been made into a movie three times, originating the
expression "the pen is mightier than the sword," and phrases like "the
great unwashed" and "the almighty dollar," Bulwer-Lytton opened his
novel Paul Clifford (1830) with the immortal words that the "Peanuts"
beagle Snoopy plagiarized for years, "It was a dark and stormy night."
The contest began in 1982 as a quiet campus affair, attracting only
three submissions. This response being a thunderous success by academic
standards, the contest went public the following year and ever since
has attracted thousands of annual entries from all over the world.
Shamelessly ripped from:
http://www2.sjsu.edu/depts/english/2005.htm
A few selections:
"Horatio Keelhaul sailed buoyantly up Cutter Street ironclad in his
resolve to torpedo the reviewer of his literary launches who threatened
his Titanic reputation with accusations of relying solely on nautical
parlance to propel his gondolaic characters through the sinuous canals
of his plots."
Rick Holinger
Geneva, IL
Winner: Purple Prose
Dishonorable Mentions: Purple Prose
"The night resembled nothing so much as the nose of a giant Labrador in
excellent health: cold, black, and wet."
Devery Doleman
Brooklyn, NY
"Our fearless heroine (well, mostly fearless: she is deathly afraid of
caterpillars, not the fuzzy little brown ones but the colossal green
ones that terrorized her while she was playing in her grandmother's
garden when she was just five or six years old, which, coincidentally,
was also when she discovered that shaving cream really does not taste
like whipped cream) awakened with a start."
Alison Heft
Lititz, PA
"As soon as Sherriff Russell heard Bradshaw say, "This town ain't big
enough for the both of us," he inadvertantly visualized a tiny
chalk-line circle with a town sign that said 'population 1,' and the
two of them both trying to stand inside of it rather ineffectively,
leaning this way and that, trying to keep their balance without
stepping outside of the line, and that was why he was smiling when
Bradshaw shot him."
Keriann Noble
Murray, UT
Winner: Western
.
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