A Dark & Stormy Night
Note: Yesterday was the deadline for entries in the 2010 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, giving rise to cries of “Doh!” (dopeslap) among procrastinaters, and wild anticipation among lovers of purple prose. To whet the appetite, here’s the 2009 winner:
“Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin’ off Nantucket Sound from the nor’east and the dogs are howlin’ for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the Ellie May, a sturdy whaler Captained by John McTavish; for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin’ and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests.”—David McKenzie, 27th grand price Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest winner,
a 55-year-old quality systems consultant and Bulwer-Lytton contest recidivist
from Federal Way, Wash., 2009 URL
a 55-year-old quality systems consultant and Bulwer-Lytton contest recidivist
from Federal Way, Wash., 2009 URL
Editor’s Note: Doh! (slap!)
About the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest: Created at San Jose State University in 1982, the contest is an international literary parody contest honoring 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.”
Image: Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl of Lytton, by George Frederic Watts (died 1904).
Today’s PeezPix: Beachrunner
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