July 20, 2004

• The thing that goes back and forth inside the old grandfather clock swung like a pendulum simply cracks me up. zedediah, how delightfully silly! [banana]
• Winner: Romance Looking up from his plate of escargots, Sean gazed across the table at Sharon and sadly realized that her bubbly personality now reminded him of the bubbles you get when you put salt on a slug and it squirms around and foams all over the place, and her moist lips were also like the slime on a slug but before you salted it, though after all these years Sharon still smelled better than slugs, but that could have been the garlic butter on her escargots. So beautiful. *sniff* Thanks zedediah!
• So many great ones but my absolute favorite has to be this one: As he entered the room within which so many a wild night of their sweltering love affair had been spent, the White Rabbit regarded her with benevolent eyes, her posture such that he suspected something was wrong, but before he could speak Alice unburied her face from her trembling hands and between her intense sobs he made out the words, "I'm late . . . I'm late." ))) for ya zedediah
• The knife handle jutted from her chest like one of the plastic pop-up timers in a frozen turkey, but from the blood pooling around the wound, it was apparent that this bird wasn't done. Fantastic.
• I don't find this funny. In fact I don't understand it at all. Can someone help me out? The aim of the competition is to write the opening sentence of a really boring or pretentious novel -- the sort of novel that makes you desperately not want to read any further. OK, I understand that bit. But most of the prizewinning entries don't look anything like the opening sentences of novels -- they're just free-standing jokes, or comic metaphors, or bad puns. Fine, if you like that sort of thing -- but so what? What's it got to do with 'bad writing'? I just don't get it. Maybe I'm suffering from an acute sense-of-humour failure here, but I really would like to understand what it is that other people find so funny about this. Am I missing some subtle literary joke? Are these, in fact, wildly clever parodies of some genre of popular fiction that I'm not familiar with?
• SlightlyFoxed, it's not really that subtle. I think it's just a kind of humor that you're not into. I for one don't get "knock-knock" jokes. " As Reynoldo lit the votive candle at the grotto for San Jose de los Platanos and prayed for the healthy delivery of his first child, he heard a disembodied voice say, "Your daughter will be 17 inches long," to which Reynoldo replied, "do you know the weight, too, San Jose?"" *almost choked to death on bite of apple while reading this* And this belongs in a Chicks in Chainmail series. (Why yes, I read them all!) It was another dork and Stormy Knight--after snapping the last of his palm dampened dollar bills into the frazzled elastic of her G string--sent him packing precisely three-eighths of a mile down Highway 20 to the spot where she'd promised him a glorious glimpse of self-awareness, and where he would discover a slight depression in the asphalt and find himself quizzically contemplating the adjacent Department of Transportation sign that read simply: "Dip in Road."
• I am proud to say that, when I was a teenager, one of my submissions appeared in a published collection of Bulwer-Lytton contest entries! I still think of that as my first published work. I'm quoting from memory, but I believe my sentence was: Her mouth said, "No! No! No!", but every other inch of her glistening, quivering body said "Yes! Yes! Yes!", except for her pancreas, which didn't care much one way or the other.
• Thanks, Alnedra. I guess I'll just have to accept that my definition of 'bad writing' differs from other people's. 'Her moist lips were like the slime on a slug before you salted it' doesn't strike me as bad writing at all -- actually it strikes me as a brilliant metaphysical conceit. To me, 'bad writing' means tired cliches and lack of imagination. The Bad Sex Award, on the other hand, does make me laugh -- because these are 'serious' novelists trying to write good fiction, rather than giggly people trying to write bad fiction.
• i think a lot of this writing goes under the category of Trying Way Way Way Too Hard to the Point of Hilariousness.
• jacobw, that's wonderful stuff. I'm thinkin' a bunch of us mofites should enter the contest next year.
• The stories are funny but I think a better contest would simply be for readers to try and collect the worst they could find out in the real world. I encountered this sentence in a fantasy short story in a book I reviewed (I believe I have it permanently engrained in memory): "She could feel it in her bones -- the ones in her pouch, and the ones in her skeleton." Oh dear.
• Jacobw, you have my highest level of respect and grudging envy, having entered this contest several times and never winning. I've already bored many an audience with the story of my first published work.
• 2006 Results! One of the runners-up is an acquaintance of mine, and sent me this year's link.
• "Detective Bart Lasiter was in his office studying the light from his one small window falling on his super burrito when the door swung open to reveal a woman whose body said you've had your last burrito for a while, whose face said angels did exist, and whose eyes said she could make you dig your own grave and lick the shovel clean." Sa-lute!
• The winner of the Romance category should be of interest.
• Ha! I missed it first time around . . . "Despite the vast differences it their ages, ethnicity, and religious upbringing, the sexual chemistry between Roberto and Heather was the most amazing he had ever experienced; and for the entirety of the Labor Day weekend they had sex like monkeys on espresso, not those monkeys in the zoo that fling their feces at you, but more like the monkeys in the wild that have those giant red butts, and access to an espresso machine. "
• Holy fucking shit! You'd think there would be at least one person at the Dept. of English & Comparative Literature at San Jose State University that would have a teeny, tiny bit of web design sense. Is there something not right with my Firefox? Are they missing a style sheet? That page is the worst I have seen in years.
• MonkeyFilter: I don't find this funny. In fact I don't understand it at all. Can someone help me out? MonkeyFilter: Trying Way Way Way Too Hard to the Point of Hilariousness. MonkeyFilter: ...like the monkeys in the wild that have those giant red butts, and access to an espresso machine. I think I need to top up the coffee.
• *smacks GramMa's red butt* *scampers*