San Jose - A shambling sentence about screaming seafarers on the sturdy whaler Ellie May stood shoulders above the rest in an annual bad writing contest.
David McKenzie, 55, of Federal Way, Washington state, won the grand prize in San Jose State University's annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest with this:
"Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin' off Nantucket Sound from the nor' east and the dogs are howlin' for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the Ellie May, a sturdy whaler captained by John McTavish; for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin' and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests."
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The contest, a parody of prose, invites entrants to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels.
| 'It was a dark and stormy night' |
It is named after Victorian writer Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton, who opened his 1830 novel Paul Clifford, with the much-quoted, "It was a dark and stormy night."
Contest categories include purple prose and vile puns.
Among the other winners announced on Monday was this entry in the style of hardboiled detective fiction: "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."
The author was Eric Rice of Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. - AP
- This article was originally published on page 11 of The Star on July 01, 2009
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