...and on a lighter note...

[hrollaug]

The 2010 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest awards were announced.

These are the awards for the best "bad" writing


Best over-all

"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."

Best Detective

"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."

Best Western

"He walked into the bar and bristled when all eyes fell upon him - perhaps because his build was so short and so wide, or maybe it was the odor that lingered about him from so many days and nights spent in the wilds, but it may just have been because no one had ever seen a porcupine in a bar before."

Fantasy

"The wood nymph fairies blissfully pranced in the morning light past the glistening dewdrops on the meadow thistles by the Old Mill, ignorant of the daily slaughter that occurred just behind its lichen-encrusted walls, twin 20-ton mill stones savagely ripping apart the husks of wheat seed, gleefully smearing the starchy entrails across their dower granite faces in unspeakable botanical horror and carnage - but that’s not our story; ours is about fairies! "

...and at last, the runner up (and my personal favorite

"Through the verdant plains of North Umbria walked Waylon Ogglethorpe and, as he walked, the clouds whispered his name, the birds of the air sang his praises, and the beasts of the fields from smallest to greatest said, "There goes the most noble among men" -- in other words, a typical stroll for a schizophrenic ventriloquist with delusions of grandeur. "

The literary competition honors the memory of 19th English century writer Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton, who famously opened his 1830 novel "Paul Clifford," with the much-quoted, "It was a dark and stormy night."

http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/