2010 Bulwer-Lytton Winners

[filkertom]

"For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity's affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss--a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity's mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world's thirstiest gerbil."

-- Molly Ringle, Seattle, WA

Comments

[markbernstein.livejournal.com]

I especially liked:

As Holmes, who had a nose for danger, quietly fingered the bloody knife and eyed the various body parts strewn along the dark, deserted highway, he placed his ear to the ground and, with his heart in his throat, silently mouthed to his companion, “Arm yourself, Watson, there is an evil hand afoot ahead.

But then, I would.

[jenrose]

Oh, me too, me too!

LOL

[annearchy.livejournal.com]

As someone who is a part-time caretaker for a gerbil (like the past 10 days while my DD was off at summer camp), I can attest to the thirsty-gerbil stuff. Also?? Gerbils seem to leave mucus or something on the tip of the water bottle. It builds up. I hope Ricardo doesn't slime Felicity that way :))

[alverant.livejournal.com]

What is the Bulwer-Lytton contest?

[shsilver.livejournal.com]

A contest for writers of bad prose, named after the popular nineteenth century author Edward Bulwyr-Lytton who wrote the immortal first line, "It was a dark and stormy night," (Paul Clifford, 1830). His best known novel is The Last Days of Pompeii (1834).

[alverant.livejournal.com]

Thought so. Thanks.

Are they TRYING to be bad or is it like the Razzies when the candidates actually tried to do a good job but had an "epic fail" instead?

[ladymer.livejournal.com]

Oh, it's on purpose all right. The goal is to write the worst possible first sentence to an imaginary novel. And if you win you get a PITTANCE!

[jenrose]

And that's the first line of one of my favorite books...lol!

[thistlethorn.livejournal.com]

Oh, OUCH. That's actually painfully bad.

[terriwells.livejournal.com]

*snort* and that's the point. The deadline for submissions to the contest, by the way, is always April 15th, because Americans associate that with another painful submission. (I'm not making this up).

[violinsontv.livejournal.com]

I've got at least two Bulwer-Lytton contest compilations lying around somewhere, neither of which should be opened without changing to a fresh Depends.

One old SF entry I remember:

"Under a sky cheesy as a deep-dish pizza, X examined his sister's blork."

[wildcard9.livejournal.com]

The winner for Detective needs to be done in the voice of Nick Danger:

"She walked into my office wearing a body that would make a man write bad checks, but in this paperless age you would first have to obtain her ABA Routing Transit Number and Account Number and then disable your own Overdraft Protection in order to do so."

[wildcard9.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, and the winner of Vile Puns needs to be shot, stabbed, set on fire, and killed just for good measure!! Truly worthy of holding one's nose and fleeing from inside Callahan's Place once it is told.

[jcw-da-dmg.livejournal.com]

I actually entered this one. My entry was justifiably ignored.

[lemmozine.livejournal.com]

I just read this at the spoken word circle at Westerconchord. Great reaction! Thanks for posting it.

[fayanora.livejournal.com]

If you want bad prose, you can't get any worse than "Atlanta Nights" by Travis Tea. There's an interesting story behind it. The pretty-much-vanity press Publish America was talking smack about science fiction, saying it was crappy literature or somesuch, and a bunch of scifi authors who were pissed at this set out to prove that Publish America can't tell good literature from its ass. They submitted "Atlanta Nights" by fictional author Travis Tea (http://www.travistea.com/) for publication, and Publish America was going to publish it! Until they found out it was a hoax.

Here is a quotes:

" Richard didn't have as sweet a personality as Andrew but then few men did but he was very well-built. He had the shoulders of a water buffalo and the waist of a ferret. He was reddened by his many sporting activities which he managed to keep up within addition to his busy job as a stock broker, and that reminded Irene of safari hunters and virile construction workers which contracted quite sexily to his suit-and-tie demeanor. Irene was considering coming onto him but he was older than Henry was when he died even though he hadn't died of natural causes but he was dead and Richard would die too someday. . . ."
— from Chapter 25 of Atlanta Nights

From Wikipedia:

The distinctive flaws of Atlanta Nights include nonidentical chapters written by two different authors from the same segment of outline (13 and 15), a missing chapter (21), two chapters that are word-for-word identical to each other (4 and 17), two different chapters with the same chapter number (12 and 12), and a chapter "written" by a computer program that generated random text based on patterns found in the previous chapters (34). Characters change gender and race; they die and reappear without explanation. Spelling and grammar are nonstandard and the formatting is inconsistent. The initials of characters who were named in the book spelled out the phrase "PublishAmerica is a vanity press."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlanta_Nights