Screamin’ seafaring tale wins bad writing contest

The winners have been announced in San Jose State University’s annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.  According to the AP article,  “The contest, a parody of prose, invites entrants to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels. It is named after Victorian writer Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton, who opened his 1830 novel “Paul Clifford,” with the much-quoted, ‘It was a dark and stormy night ….’ Contest categories include purple prose and vile puns.”

Here’s this year’s grand prize 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.”

The runner-up:

“The wind dry-shaved the cracked earth like a dull razor–the double edge kind from the plastic bag that you shouldn’t use more than twice, but you do; but Trevor Earp had to face it as he started the second morning of his hopeless search for Drover, the Irish Wolfhound he had found as a pup near death from a fight with a prairie dog and nursed back to health, stolen by a traveling circus so that the monkey would have something to ride.”

And my personal favorite, the winner in the Detective category:

“She walked into my office on legs as long as one of those long-legged birds that you see in Florida – the pink ones, not the white ones – except that she was standing on both of them, not just one of them, like those birds, the pink ones, and she wasn’t wearing pink, but I knew right away that she was trouble, which those birds usually aren’t.”

For complete details and more winners, visit the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest website (“Where WWW means Wretched Writers Welcome”).

(Thanks to Paul for the submission!)

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