The results of this year’s Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest have been announced, and the winner is one of us! Yes, as the founders note, grand prize winner Dan McKay is “a 43-year-old quantitative analyst for Microsoft Great Plains … A resident of Fargo, North Dakota, McKay is currently visiting China, perhaps to escape notoriety for his dubious literary achievement.”
The achievement in question is this amazingly bad opening sentence for a novel that (of course) does not exist, which is after all the whole point of the Bulwer-Lytton contest:
As he stared at her ample bosom, he daydreamed of the dual Stromberg carburetors in his vintage Triumph Spitfire, highly functional yet pleasingly formed, perched prominently on top of the intake manifold, aching for experienced hands, the small knurled caps of the oil dampeners begging to be inspected and adjusted as described in chapter seven of the shop manual.
The competition was fierce, based on entries like this one:
It was high noon in the jungles of South India when I began to recognize that if we didn’t find water for our emus soon, it wouldn’t be long before we would be traveling by foot; and with the guerilla warriors fast on our heals, I was starting to regret my decision to use poultry for transportation.
And this one, from the Children’s Literature division:
Because of her mysterious ways I was fascinated with Dorothy and I wondered if she would ever consider having a relationship with a lion, but I have to admit that most of my attention was directed at her little dog Toto because, after all, he was a source of meat protein and I had had enough of those damn flying monkeys.
And a cautionary tale for anyone who thinks they can do this for a living:
Inside his cardboard box, Greg heated a dented can of Spaghetti-O’s over a small fire made from discarded newspapers, then cracked open his last can of shoplifted generic beer to celebrate the 10th anniversary of his embarkation on a career as a freelance writer.
Ed Bott 