Bulwer-Lytton Challenge, Due April 15th

The Bulwer-Lytton contest is open. Post your crappy sentences here and/or enter the actual contest.

All entries are due by April 15th.

The web site is: www.bulwer-lytton.com

Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest

The rules to the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest are childishly simple:
Each entry must consist of a single sentence but you may submit as many entries as you wish.

Sentences may be of any length (though you go beyond 50 or 60 words at your peril), and entries must be "original" (as it were) and previously unpublished.
Surface mail entries should be submitted on index cards, the sentence on one side and the entrant's name, address, and phone number on the other.

Email entries should be in the body of the message, NOT in an attachment. If you are submitting multiple entries, please include them in one message.
Entries will be judged by categories, from "general" to detective, western, science fiction, romance, and so on. There will be overall winners as well as category winners.

The official deadline is April 15 (a date that Americans associate with painful submissions and making up bad stories). The actual deadline may be as late as June 30.

The contest accepts submissions every day of the livelong year.
Wild Card Rule: Resist the temptation to work with puns like "It was a stark and dormy night."

Send your entries to:
Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest
Department of English
San Jose State University
San Jose, CA 95192-0090

Okay, you chickens, I'll start.

Serena gasped, causing her opulent bosom to heave as if several mice crawled below the surface of alabaster skin, blue-veined and rosy-tipped, the mounds of Venus made Rupert gasp for air as if a plastic bag was placed over his head and held tight around his throat.

Irresistibly she stared, her blue eyes locked on his golden-hazel ones - made tangerine by the sun's sweltering orange rays - but it wasn't the color of his eyes she was noticing; it was their greed, so green with envy it made her blush - a delicate pink shade that grew red with anger as she realized this man she desired was less obtainable than a rainbow.

Gayla: I wondered if you'd move this colorful piece of writing here. That's what gave me the idea for the challenge.

I would never want to make you blue, Marva.

Gayla

Wilson wandered the world wide wondering when wisdom would win and wicked ways would wane, while also worrying who would wean his weasel.

Wean his weasel? Is that a euphemism? Very funny, Opal. :D

Western Entry:

Gunn flicked the cylinder of the six-shooter round and round, wondering if the five bullets would be enough to settle the feud with Blackstone the rotten, no-good ranch boss who ran the Bar-K-Bar with an iron fist while he courted the daughter of Elmer Doughtry, who died under suspicious circumstances while driving the herd of heifers to market on that last hot, humid day in August when Veronica had gone to town, shopping for a new gingham dress just the day before the big dance at the barn where Tray Smith and his Hoe-Down Kings were playing and Bill Treadwell was calling his last square dance before he retired and moved to San Francisco with Lucy, the high-kickin' gal from the saloon.

This one comes from a political satire I wrote sometime back. I’ve made a few adjustments and think it’s suitable for the occasion.

On Babies:

Mister Sellers kneeled beside little Katie’s bed and explained, "Every forty-one point six years a celluloid combustion of meteoric convulsions burst in and out of a diamond echelon for an exact quadric round of seven and one billionth of a ratio, casually scaled on your average barometer for the precise equation of approximate transient results, normally about the speed of light, sending electricity wantonly through the inner dimensions of your average latex bystander and swelling to minute levels of massive miniature radio waves which casually gaze at the inhumanity and uselessness of financial refinement, the typical datable consumptive hospital-bird of pity and wealth in wonderland, crossing circuits to the chief sausage and proving that the walrus was in fact Ringo, and that every twenty tulips there’s two times too many tangerines, and that, my dear, is where babies come from."

God, I didn't know that! And I thought it was sex.

I think your first "casually" should be causally.

and that for every twenty tulips..

two times too many: twice too many

Sorry for the edit. Like mine, this is too long for the competition, but I don't think you should lose a single word of it.

Marva, Opal, BadDay: All I can say is I would hate to be the judges.

Marva on your western entry: Whew...you've got it all there. Very well done.

Opal: Loved the alliteration. Very clever and the weasel part was gave me a giggle.

BadDay: That was awesome! How did you ever come up with it?

Marva - Thank you! But the word usage was intentional. I liked yours, 'twas neat.

Gayla - Thank you, too!

Mark Twain, Jimi Hendrix, and Mel Brooks. And yes, Webster too.

Sure, Bad. I hesitated to even post those technicals, but figured it couldn't hurt. As always, the writer needs to decide what the heck it is they're doing.

On the western: I think it could be lengthened into at least a novella. Anybody want to try, be my guest. :D