Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest

Bulwer-Lytton
Fiction Contest
2008 Results

The following is from the web page of:
Dept. of English & Comparative Literature
San Jose State University
One Washington SquareSan Jose, CA 95192

The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, 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."

Here is the over all winner:

Theirs was a New York love, a checkered taxi ride burning rubber, and like the city their passion was open 24/7, steam rising from their bodies like slick streets exhaling warm, moist, white breath through manhole covers stamped "Forged by DeLaney Bros., Piscataway, N.J."

submitted by: Garrison SpikWashington, D.C.

Most entries are submitted electronically through the Contest's Web site: A new collection of previous winners was published in August 2007 by The Friday Project. It is available through Amazon.com.uk.

Runner-Up"Hmm . . ." thought Abigail as she gazed languidly from the veranda past the bright white patio to the cerulean sea beyond, where dolphins played and seagulls sang, where splashing surf sounded like the tintinnabulation of a thousand tiny bells, where great gray whales bellowed and the sunlight sparkled off the myriad of sequins on the flyfish's bow ties, "time to get my meds checked."

---Andrew Bowers

All of the winning submissions may be found at: http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/.


Kuddos to http://eruditeredneck.blogspot.com/ who pointed this out.

Now here is the assignment of my readers.
Write an an example of a contest entry for 2009.




art:prestongirls wordpress.com




Mine is:

After Snoopy re-read the Bulwer-Lytton entries for 2008 he stomped around his dog house so hard that a trench formed and then filled with water during the dark and stormy night creating a moat that caused the Spad to nose down into the mud and crash the next morning on an attempted take off.

I floated this on ER's blog but it was ignored like a cow peeing in the barn yard.

So what is your creation?

Deadline for entry is September 3, 2008.

All entries will be judged by impartial, unbiased, nonpartisan, fair, intelligent, and knowledgeable judge.