Bulwer-Lytton
Originally published at Confessions of a Half-baked Talemaker. You can comment here or there.
I have this other blog. Okay, I have lots of blogs, but I have this other very important blog: www.ebookcover4u.com. If you can’t tell by the title, it’s one of those official-sounding work blogs that deals with work. Very official.
I put up an update to it today and saw, to my surprise, it has 733 followers.
Subsequently, my thoughts for this blog were momentarily derailed. 733 followers! Who’d have thunk people liked it when I get serious.
But I’m not here to talk about 733 followers - all of which may or may not actually read the blog they’re following. No, my lone reader on these particular pages in the internet sphere, I’m here to tell you briefly about the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.
It seems to me I’ve seen this contest before, but perhaps I didn’t pay attention. Fate is a funny old lady most days, and she’s patient to boot. Circumstances brought me back to this contest again, only this time I was in the right frame of mind to receive the information.
I can sum it up using their premise sum up: “It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents - except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.” - Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford (1830)
I can also tell you what it is. It’s a contest in which you write monstrous lines like the one above. The theme of your monstrosity line is based on literary prose genre. The point to it: That it be the first line to probably the worst book ever to be picked up by your unworthy hands. The opening sentences people enter into the contest tend to be pretty punny, and clever. If you don’t have half a brain, I don’t recommend you give it a try.
I have decided I do not have enough brain to try.
Well maybe I will in the future.
Check it out, if you dare: http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/index.html