That is, the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest<\/b>. Thanks to Mr. Z for forwarding the results of this year’s contest to me.<\/p>\n
So what is this contest? And who the hell is Bulwer-Lytton? I actually have a vast store of useless knowledge about this man, because he was the favorite writer of Lucy Maud Montgomery<\/a>, when she was a kid. Because of my obsession with HER, I actually read some of Bulwer-Lytton’s stuff.<\/p>\n His is the purplest of purple purple prose. LM Montgomery later looked back on his stuff and thought, “What was I THINKING?” and yet she always defended him, because in doing so, she honored how much she had loved him when she was young.<\/p>\n Now – onto the contest-description:<\/b><\/p>\n 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.” <\/p><\/blockquote>\n And here are the 2004 winners and runners-up<\/a>. These are CLASSIC!!<\/p>\n The winner, Dave Zobel, came up with this bad opening sentence:<\/p>\n She resolved to end the love affair with Ramon tonight . . . summarily, like Martha Stewart ripping the sand vein out of a shrimp’s tail . . . though the term “love affair” now struck her as a ridiculous euphemism . . . not unlike “sand vein,” which is after all an intestine, not a vein . . . and that tarry substance inside certainly isn’t sand . . . and that brought her back to Ramon.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n But all the entries are hysterical.<\/p>\n This one, sent in by Siew-Fong Yiap of Hong Kong might be my favorite:<\/p>\n The legend about Padre Castillo’s gold being buried deep in the Blackwolf Hills had lain untold for centuries and will continue to do so for this story is not about hidden treasure, nor is it set in any mountainous terrain whatsoever.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n HA!!<\/p>\n This one, though, is pretty damn good, too – It’s a parody of Bulwer-Lytton’s “dark and stormy night” line:<\/p>\n It was a stark and dormy night–the kind of Friday night in the dorm where wistful women\/girls without dates ovulated pointlessly and dreamed of steamy sex with bad boy\/men in the backseat of a Corvette–like the one on Route 66, only a different color, though the color was hard to determine because the TV show was in black and white–if only Corvettes had back seats.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Jesus. “Ovulated pointlessly” … ha … sounds like my life!<\/p>\n Anyway, read them all<\/a>, and laugh!!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" That is, the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. Thanks to Mr. Z for forwarding the results of this year’s contest to me. So what is this contest? And who the hell is Bulwer-Lytton? I actually have a vast store of useless knowledge … Continue reading