Quote from: Bulwer-Lytton Fiction ContestAn 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 Charles Schulz' beagle Snoopy plagiarized for years, "It was a dark and stormy night."
Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest 2007 Results
*waits for GG to share her favourites...again...*
Thanks for the link, Agent. :)
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Phantom Bunburyist and [THIS SPACE AVAILABLE FOR LEASE TO NEW DUAL TITLE TENANT]
Someday I'm going to have to try my hand at this. I should be a natural. ;)
I especially liked this one:
"I was in a back alley in Fiji, fighting desperately and silently for my life, fighting desperately for oxygen, clawing at the calm and almost gentle pressure of the fabric held over my face by implacable, ebony thighs when I realized -- he was killing me softly with his sarong."
Ooo.. it's that time of year again? Must dig up my book! :D
Some of us here should enter this some year. Seriously.
I will if you will :)
Allow me to humbug - but c'mon - anyone can do it if they get to write a 100 word opening "paragraph." Run-on sentences aside, I'll be impressed when someone can do it in 20 words or less.
19 words.
"We'd made it through yet another nuclear winter and the lawn had just trapped and eaten its first robin."
Past honorable mention in sci-fi.