Once again, bad prose rules!

Recently released: Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest 2005 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." The contest began in 1982 as a quiet campus affair, attracting only three submissions. This response being a thunderous success by academic standards, the contest went public the following year and ever since has attracted thousands of annual entries from all over the world.

And here is a first few words of the winning entry: As he stared at her ample bosom, he daydreamed of the dual Stromberg carburetors ... It's worth visiting All About Romance's Purple Prose Parody contests, too. I'm sorry that I didn't blog much lately, but I am trying to create a new blog look and layout since the current blog here is a bit screwy. Le sigh. Be good, be bad & be safe.