Bulwer-Lytton Contest 2009!

[Morreion]

Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest 2009 Results

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."

Most entries are submitted electronically through the Contest's Web site: www.bulwer-lytton.com/.

Fleur looked down her nose at Guilliame, something she was accomplished at, being six foot three in her stocking feet, and having one of those long French noses, not pert like Bridget Bardot's, but more like the one that Charles De Gaulle had when he was still alive and President of France and he wore that cap that was shaped like a little hatbox with a bill in the front to offset his nose, but it didn't work.

Marguerite Ahl
Prescott valley, AZ

No man is an island, so they say, although the small crustaceans and the bird which sat impassively on Dirk Manhope's chest as he floated lazily in the pool would probably disagree.

Glen Robins
Brighton, East Sussex, U.K.

On a lovely day during one of the finest Indian summers anyone could remember--a season the Germans call "old wives' summer," obviously never having had Native Americans to name things after, but plenty of old wives, and "Indian summer" in German would refer to the natives of India in any case, which would make even less sense than the current naming system--on such a day, however named, John Baxter fell in the creek and drowned.

Deanna Stewart
Heidelberg, Germany

[EchoVamper]

It was all so typical of an online get together that half the group would wait at the Inn with Barliman while others waited somewhere else, but Paradis had no compunctions about dragging them all down to the wrong Chetwood to get him where he should have been three days ago, nor did Bedregar when he went link dead and sunk slowly while scowling into the marshwater mire, leaving the group only to see his pasty face looking longingly up at them through the boggy stench and head back to the Prancing Pony.

[ariesel]

You are so clever, Echo

[Morreion]