It Was A Dark & Stormy Night...

[patsmom]

<p>Here are the 2007 winners, runners-up and dishonorable mentions of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. <a href=“This website has moved!”>This website has moved!;

<p>Warning … do not read these while drinking your morning coffee unless you don’t mind doing a spit take all over your monitor and keyboard. :eek:</p>

<p>Here are some samples:

LaVerne was undeniably underdressed for this frigid weather; her black, rain-soaked tank top offered no protection and seemed to cling to her torso out of sheer rage, while her tie-dyed boa scarf hung lifeless around her neck like a giant, exhausted, pipe cleaner recently discarded after near-criminal overuse by an obviously sadistic (and rather flamboyant) plumber.

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She clung to the memory of their love like those tiny bits of used tissues he always left in his pockets, which mostly ended up in the dryer lint basket although enough of them welded themselves to her favorite navy blue, polar fleece pullover, rendering it as permanently flawed and unappealing as his name tattooed on her butt.

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The small boat pitched violently upon the heaving bosom of the ocean, causing Johnson to reflect that, although he generally liked bosoms, he was getting really tired of the ocean’s bosom, and wished that it would at least drop from a 44D to a 34B.

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[bdmrad]

<p>Great examples for college essays, I’d say. Thanks so much for the link.</p>

[atomom]

<p>lol–#2 sounds all too familiar–except for the tattoo, that is.</p>

[Karen_Colleges]

<p>Thanks for the link. </p>

<p>Her heart clammored for just one of these opening lines to be made into a novel; sadly, each story is shorter than summer in the arctic circle. </p>

<p>hah, not so easy to write as you might think.</p>

[JHS]

<p>I remember loving the New York magazine competition where they did this, about 35 years ago. I can still remember at least one of the winning entries:</p>

<p>“What can you say about a 123-year-old, hunchbacked, royalist dwarf who died?”</p>

<p>(I guess that entry fixes the date at sometime in 1970 or shortly thereafter.) I think the prompt was something like, “Write the first sentence of a novel that the publisher rejected without reading further.”</p>

[Momneedsadvice]

<p>From the website linked by Patsmom:</p>

<p>Winner: Children’s Literature</p>

<p>Danny, the little Grizzly cub, frolicked in the tall grass on this sunny Spring morning, his mother keeping a watchful eye as she chewed on a piece of a hiker they had encountered the day before.
Dave McKenzie
Federal Way, WA </p>

<p>Runner-Up:</p>

<p>Mary had a little lamb; its fleece was Polartec 200 (thanks to gene splicing, a diet of force-fed petrochemical supplements, and regular dips in an advanced surface fusion polymer), which had the fortunate side effect of rendering it inedible, unlike that other Mary’s organic lamb which misbehaved at school and wound up in a lovely Moroccan stew with dried apricots and couscous.
Julie Jensen
Lodi, CA</p>

[mommusic]

<p>Thanks for posting this! Every year they make the rounds of our friends & family and this year I am the first to send it out!</p>

[Karen_Colleges]

<p>My favorite was also about Danny the little Grizzly cub.</p>

<p>I’ll be passing the link on to the kid in college.</p>