A contest you really should have a go at. Reading the past winners is enough to keep you both snickering and groaning out loud for a good part of the afternoon. You never know, you might just write something worse than anyone else in the Entire World. It’s a shortcut to especially fleeting fame and not much fortune as, according to the website, the prize money is a pittance.
Here are just a few choice efforts, the first being this year’s winner:
For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity’s affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss – a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity’s mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world’s thirstiest gerbil. ~ Molly Ringle (Seattle, WA)
Fleur looked down her nose at Guilliame, something she was accomplished at, being six foot three in her stocking feet, and having one of those long French noses, not pert like Bridget Bardot’s, but more like the one that Charles De Gaulle had when he was still alive and President of France and he wore that cap that was shaped like a little hatbox with a bill in the front to offset his nose, but it didn’t work. ~ Marguerite Ahl (Prescott valley, AZ)
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. ~ Eric Rice (Sun Prairie, WI)
And last but not least:
Melinda woke up suddenly to the sound of her trailer being pounded with wind and hail, and she couldn’t help thinking that if she had only put her prized hog up for adoption last May, none of this would be happening, no one would have gotten hurt, and she wouldn’t be left with only nine toes, or be living in a mobile home park in Nebraska with a second-rate trapeze artist named Fred. ~ Ada Marie Finkel (Boston, MA)
Go on, sharpen your pencils and your brains — but not with an actual brain sharpener or you will be spending six to nine months in the hospital and learning to like wearing adult diapers and being fed spaghetti oops with a plastic spoon — and give it your all…
See, if I can, anyone can! Check out the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.
some of that sites published examples are brilliant too:
“With a desparate effort I wrenched my eyes from the hypnotic glare of the snake. I rolled them toward the door. I dared move no further.”
a corker!
“Agnes liked her job too much and carried it with her. She was like a human LEGO display–loveable but provoking.”
‘Every once in a while he got away, and the sense of freedom when he wasn’t under their gaze could be exhilarating, until he considered what it meant about his life that he felt free when what he really was was lost; what it said about him that just being out on the sidewalk or among trees by himself made him feel freed; pretty pitiful, when you thought about it’