Posted on 07/17/2004 9:09:20 AM PDT by Xenalyte
Since 1982, the English Department at San Jose State University has sponsored the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, a whimsical literary competition that challenges entrants to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels. The BLFC was the brainchild (or Rosemary's baby) of Professor Scott Rice, whose graduate school excavations unearthed the source of the line "It was a dark and stormy night." Sentenced to write a seminar paper on a minor Victorian novelist, he chose the man with the funny hyphenated name, Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, who was best known for perpetrating The Last Days of Pompeii, Eugene Aram, Rienzi, The Caxtons, The Coming Race, and--not least--Paul Clifford, whose famous opener has been plagiarized repeatedly by Snoopy.
(Excerpt) Read more at bulwer-lytton.com ...
"Why don't you send my husband, Joe?", said Valerie.
Her bitter mood evaded detection like a gunman on a grassy knoll, so the customer service representative was able to complete her work quickly and effectively, like a gunman on a grassy knoll.
The room was occasionally filled with light from nearby lightning strikes, allowing Jim to read intermittently from the letter Jane had sent him just before she left him to run off to the south of France with Lance, the handsome ski-instructor/ mountain-climber/ lawn tractor salesman from Duluth she had met while he, Jim, not Lance, was in the hospital having the pus drained from his abscess.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
"Like many others, it was a funky and skunky Saturday."
"As the sun mounted the sky, her shrill shriek rose with it."
LOL!!!
At the striking of noon on a certain fifth of March, there occurred within a causal radius of Brandon railway-station and yet beyond the deepest pools of emptiness between the uttermost stellar systems one of those infinitesimal ripples in the creative silence of the First Cause which always occur when an exceptional stir of heightened consciousness agitates any living organism in this astronomical universe. Something passed at that moment, a wave, a motion, a vibration, too tenuous to be called magnetic, too subliminal to be called spiritual, between the soul of a particular human being who was emerging from a third-class carriage of the twelve-nineteen train from London and the divine-diabolic soul of the First Cause of all life.
--John Cowper Powys,
A Glastonbury Romance
LOL You're killing me!!!
Michael scowled at the new shubbery that Marian had planted while he was away and wondered again where his dog had gotten to.
As Sarah's last gasp of hope left her spirit, she began to ponder...who let the dogs out?
Geneva's countinance darkened as she thought yet again how Brandon had deceived her. As her iron glided over his shirt she thought, "This doesn't make me feel like a woman!"
"His mind reeled at the news, as if spun by a Tilt-a-Whirl gone haywire."
"Something passed at that moment. . ."
Well, there's a phrase I'm not brave enough to play with.
The wind howled through the portico like a wounded bassett hound.
clutching what was left of the empty black pants suit to his breast he wept cried with relief, not realising it had merely molted....
Good one. You beat me to that one.
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