After seeing a particular "awesome" (and awesome!) line in Super Paper Mario (it was along the lines of "I will hit you like an unseen dodgeball in a sweaty high-school gym" and I assume it was borrowed from something similar in the movie Dodgeball) last night, I was reminded of the Bulwer-Lytton bad fiction contest. I just wrote and submitted the following entry:
"After staring lustily at a frustratingly vicious--yet oddly compelling--differential equation that reminded him vaguely and for no good reason of his recently imprisoned ex-girlfriend, the notion that he was about to retire and shouldn't bother with such nonsense hit Professor Cvitanovic like Morrissey singing about a bad debt that he (Cvitanovic, not Morrissey) could not pay."
By the way, here are the 2007 winners of the contest. (And, yes, I did borrow the last name of my former [unofficial] postdoc advisor.)
Please share your "awesome" sentences in this spot. I think that one can do considerably "better" than my entry.
Update: The person who runs the contest (Scott Rice) responded to my submission with the following comment: "Only one submission, from a person with your powers of invention?" Now I feel compelled to come up with more sentences... Any thoughts on what I should put in there? Currently, I'm thinking of being meta- and including the idea of being short of inspiring ideas for a clever sentence. Maybe I can just be recursive? Here's a start: "Short of ideas for an "awesome" sentence to submit to the Bulwer-Lytter bad fiction contest, Oxford professor Mason Porter decided to rely on recursion." This clearly needs some embellishment, however, and I'd like to make the sentence itself recursive.
1 day ago
3 comments:
Here is one of the 'general dishonorable mention' sentences from 2007:
John lay in the morning dew next to his sleeping love as the pink hues of the sun rose over the rolling hills, illuminating a tender scene where for the first time satisfaction had come for a happy couple, who had fought all manner of obstacles to come to this one glorious moment, defiant in the face of Montana's repressive bestiality laws.
Dan Stuart
Burlington, VT
That's awesome!
Damn those repressive bestiality laws! :-D
I can't help you on your desire for recursion, but I think over-the-top genre cliches might be fertile ground. Does B-L allow submissions to be specifically fake first sentences of horrible fantasy novels? That alien vampire crap that Making Light mocked a few weeks ago is more or less what I'm thinking of. For B-L, try something involving a pretentious half-elf half-demon half-dragon (OK, slapping on more than two "half-X" templates is perhaps a bit too D&D-specific...) brooding about the Evil Overlord taking over the world with his/her/its armies of vampires, werewolves, and bunnies. ("I have a theory, it might be bunnies...")
Anyway, that's all I've got. Good luck!
Ah yes... the whole bunny thing. That was great --- especially when the point was hammered home in the background story episode.
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