2005
2005 Results
Dept. of English & Comparative Literature San Jose State University One Washington Square San Jose, CA 95192#
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Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest\
2005 Results
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.#
Dan McKay\
Fargo, ND
A 43-year-old quantitative analyst for Microsoft Great Plains is the winner of the 23rd running of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. A resident of Fargo, North Dakota, McKay is currently visiting China, perhaps to escape notoriety for his dubious literary achievement.#
His entry, extolling a subject that has engaged poets for millennia, may
have been inspired by Roxie Hart of the musical \"Chicago.\" Complaining
of her husband\'s ineptitude in the boudoir, Roxie laments, \"Amos was .
. . zero. I mean, he made love to me like he was fixing a carburetor or
something.\"
An international literary parody contest, the competition honors the
memory (if not the reputation) of Victorian novelist Edward George Earl
Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873). The goal of the contest is childishly simple:
entrants are challenged to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary
novels. Although best known for \"The Last Days of Pompeii\" (1834),
which has been made into a movie three times, originating the expression
\"the pen is mightier than the sword,\" and phrases like \"the great
unwashed\" and \"the almighty dollar,\" Bulwer-Lytton opened his novel
Paul Clifford (1830) with the immortal words that the \"Peanuts\" Beagle
Snoopy plagiarized for years, \"It was a dark and stormy night.\"
The contest began in 1982 as a quiet campus affair, attracting only
three submissions. This response being a thunderous success by academic
standards, the contest went public the following year and ever since has
attracted thousands of annual entries from all over the world.
Runner-Up:#
When Detective Riggs was called to investigate the theft of a trainload of Native American fish broth concentrate bound for market, he solved the case almost immediately, being that the trail of clues led straight to the trainmaster, who had both the locomotive and the Hopi tuna tea.#
Mitsy Rae\
Danbury, NE
Grand Panjandrum\'s Special Award#
India, which hangs like a wet washcloth from the towel rack of Asia, presented itself to Tex as he landed in Delhi (or was it Bombay?), as if it mattered because Tex finally had an idea to make his mark and fortune and that idea was a chain of steak houses to serve the millions and he wondered, as he deplaned down the steep, shiny, steel steps, why no one had thought of it before.#
Ken Aclin\
Shreveport, LA
Winner: Adventure Category#
Captain Burton stood at the bow of his massive sailing ship, his weathered face resembling improperly cured leather that wouldn\'t even be used to make a coat or something.#
Bryan Semrow\
Oshkosh, WI
Runner-Up#
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.#
Eric Winter\
Minneapolis, MN
Dishonorable Mention#
When the great Italian archeologist, Giovanni Battista de Rossi, broke through the centuries of choking rubble and rock in the abandoned catacombs under Rome and the dust cleared, he held his blazing torch high, pickup a flat, dirt-encrusted object with a row of teeth, examined it with his educated eye, and exclaimed, \"By the saints, I do believe I\'ve discovered another ancient kitty comb.\"#
Mitsy Rae\
Danbury, NE
Winner: Children\'s Literature#
The woods were all a-twitter with rumors that the Seven Dwarves were planning a live reunion after their attempted solo careers had dismally sputtered into Z-list oblivion and it was all just a matter of meeting a ten-page list of outlandish demands (including 700-threadcount Egyptian cotton bedsheets, lots of white lilies and a separate trailer for the magic talking mirror) to get the Princess Formerly Known As Snow White on board.#
Shelby Leung\
Dulwich Hill\
NSW, Australia
Runner-Up#
When Mr Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday, his children packed his bags and drove him to Golden Pastures retirement complex just off Interstate 95.#
Stephen Farnsworth\
Manchester, U.K.
Dishonorable Mentions#
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.#
Randy Blanton\
Murfreesboro, TN
The children of Hamelin were led away by a pied piper (it\'s common knowledge) to parts unknown; whither they went is now herein revealed, however the precise location is cloaked in accordance with International Fantasy Regulation IFR.02.3a governing site specifics as, for example, in any Harry Potter story the locations are indeed identified, but just you try and find them.#
P.S.Hamilton\
Pearland, TX
\"What are you doing in my bedroom at this time of night, Ernie, and why are you grinning at me with those sharp teeth and how come you\'ve been spending so much time with the Count lately, and why has Big Bird disappeared, and you should really do something about that breath, or my name isn\'t Bert the muppet.\"#
Vicki Nunn\
Gladstone, Queensland, Australia
Winner: Dark and Stormy Night#
It was a dark and stormy night, although technically it wasn\'t black or anything -- more of a gravy color like the spine of the 1969 Scribner\'s Sons edition of \"A Farewell to Arms,\" and, truth be told, the storm didn\'t sound any more fierce than the opening to Leon Russell\'s 1975 classic, \"Back to the Island.\"#
Kevin Hogg\
Cranbrook, BC\
Canada
Winner: Detective#
Patricia wrote out the phrase \'It was a dark and stormy night\' exactly seventy-two times, which was the same number of times she stabbed her now quickly-rotting husband, and the same number of pages she ripped out of \'He\'s Just Not That Into You\' by Greg Behrendt to scatter around the room -- not because she was obsessive compulsive, or had any sentimental attachment to the number seventy-two, but because she\'d always wanted to give those quacks at CSI a hard time.#
Kari A. Stiller\
College Station, TX
Winner: Fantasy Fiction#
\"Why does every task in the Realm of Zithanor have to be a quest?\" Baldak of Erthorn, handyman to the Great Wizard Zarthon, asked rhetorically as he began his journey to find the Holy Hammer of Taloria and the Sacred Nail of Ikthillia so Baldak could hang one of Zarthon\'s mediocre watercolors, which was an art critique Baldak kept to himself unlike his predecessor, whom Zarthon turned into the Picture Frame of Torathank.#
SSG Kevin Craver\
Fort Polk, LA
Runner-Up#
The dragon cast his wet, rheumy eyes, heavy-lidded with misery, over his kingdom-a malodorous, rot-ridden swamp, with moss cloaking brooding, gloomy cypresses, tree trunks like decayed teeth rising from stagnant ponds, creatures with mildewed fur and scales whom the meanest roadside zoo would have rejected--and hoped the antidepressants would kick in soon.#
Constance Barrett\
Ruby, NY
Winner: Historical Fiction#
Sphincter, the gladiator, girded his loins in preparation for today\'s games, glad to be part of the season opener since he hadn\'t been sure until yesterday that his contract would be renewed, given his slump during the Germans-versus-lions series but he knew that swatting Germans into the lion\'s pit was trickier than it looked and he told the officials that they should look at his other stats, not just Huns batted in.#
Robert Peltzer\
Baltimore, MD
Runner-Up#
A column of five hundred Roman foot soldiers - a column held together by the plaster of courage -- advanced on a teeming sea of rebellious slaves -- slaves who had, ironically, built most of Rome\'s columns, although they actually used lime and not plaster to cement the structures, and though it is perhaps more historically precise to describe the soldiers\' column as bound by the lime of courage, that doesn\'t really have the same adventurous ring to it.#
Mark Hawthorne\
Rohnert Park, CA
Dishonorable Mention#
\"Wet leaves stuck to the spinning wagon wheels like feathers to a freshly tarred heretic, reminding those who watched them of the endless movement of the leafy earth-or so they would have, if only those fifteenth-century onlookers had believed that the earth actually rotated, which they didn\'t, which is why it was heretical to say that it did-and which is the reason why the wagon held a freshly tarred heretic in the first place.\"#
Alf Seegert\
Salt Lake City, UT
Winner: Purple Prose#
Horatio Keelhaul sailed buoyantly up Cutter Street ironclad in his resolve to torpedo the reviewer of his literary launches who threatened his Titanic reputation with accusations of relying solely on nautical parlance to propel his gondolaic characters through the sinuous canals of his plots.#
Rick Holinger\
Geneva, IL
Runner-Up#
She walked toward him, her dress billowing in the wind -- not a calm and predictable billows like the sea, but more like the billowing of a mildewed shower curtain in a cheap motel where one has to dance around to avoid touching it while trying to rinse off soap.#
Kristin Harbuck\
Bozeman, MT
Dishonorable Mentions#
\"The night resembled nothing so much as the nose of a giant Labrador in excellent health: cold, black, and wet.\"#
Devery Doleman\
Brooklyn, NY
After months of pent-up emotions like a caffeine-addict trying to kick
the habit, Cathy finally let the tears come, at first dripping
sporadically like an old clogged percolator, then increasing slowly like
a 10-cup coffeemaker with an automatic drip, and eventually pouring out
and noisily wailing like a cappuccino maker complete with slurping
froth.
Chris Bui\
Pensacola, FL
After she realized the man she had fallen in love with was her long lost
twin brother and they must break up immediately, they shared one last
kiss that left a bitter yet sweet taste in her mouth--kind of like
throwing up after eating a junior mint.
Tami Farmer\
Rome, GA
The rising sun crawled over the ridge and slithered across the hot
barren terrain into every nook and cranny like grease on a Denny\'s
grill in the morning rush, but only until eleven o\'clock when they
switch to the lunch menu.
Lester Guyse\
Portland, OR
Mitzi\'s wet T-shirt clung to her torso like paint on the nose cone of a
jumbo jet.
James Macdonald\
Vancouver, B.C., Canada
Coincidentally, just as Rose hung out the third sheet out to dry, it
started to rain down in sheets and not the soft kind like a fine
400-count Egyptian cotton, but more harsh like a cheap poly blend but
even so, Rose didn\'t notice as she was three sheets to the wind.
Barbara Bridges\
Sierra Madre, CA
The golden-haired dawn curled back the fading face of night in a
perpetual coiffure like an Ace comb in God\'s hand parting the day,
making pompadours of mountains, crew cuts of Kansas wheat fields, and
trendy cuts of the oceans\' rolling waves.
Gordon Grant\
Savannah, GA
As the sun sank low beyond the glistening horizon, even that far into
the dusk, the violent rays shot up from below, lighting up the
undersides of the clouds in magnificent oranges and golds, turning the
owls and bats and starlings black against the sky and sending chills
through Myrna, who paused from squeezing the last lactic acid from the
dripping curds inside the cheesecloth.
Ed Buhrer\
Louisa, VA
Our fearless heroine (well, mostly fearless: she is deathly afraid of
caterpillars, not the fuzzy little brown ones but the colossal green
ones that terrorized her while she was playing in her grandmother\'s
garden when she was just five or six years old, which, coincidentally,
was also when she discovered that shaving cream really does not taste
like whipped cream) awakened with a start.
Alison Heft\
Lititz, PA
Winner: Romance#
Billy Bob gushed like a broken water main about his new love: \"She\'s got long, beautiful, drain-clogging hair, more curves than an under-the-sink water trap, and she moves with the ease of a motorized toilet snake through a four-inch sewer line, but what she sees in me, a simple plumber, I\'ll never know.\"#
Glenn Lawrie\
Chung-buk, South Korea
Runner-Up#
\"Oh my God!\" Amber whispered as the compressor throbbed to life, shuddered rhythmically towards its inevitable conclusion, and shot ninety pounds of sultry air through custom-bored, cold-drawn, boss-lock-fitted crimp-couplings as Chuck Key glanced up with a smile that only tire shop guys can smile.#
Jere Hudson\
Ashland, OR
Dishonorable Mentions#
Sandra had waited and wished for Gary to come sweep her off her feet, feeling just like Lois Lane waiting for her handsome, masculine Superman to come fly her away from the humdrum of everyday life, but Gary had never come, and so she\'d ended up with Herman, a man as bald as Lex Luthor with worse eyesight than Clark Kent and the maturity level of Jimmy Olsen.#
Mary P. Potts\
Bradenton, FL
Looking sideways at Thomas, Mireille slowly removed her scarf, waiting .
. . hoping . . . praying that when he came close enough to smell the
delectable fragrance of her long, luscious waves that he wasn\'t going
to start sneezing or sniffling or rubbing his eyes, because those were
tell-tale signs of his allergies acting up, and if they did, he would
know that she had been out rolling around in the lavender fields with
Luc again.
Keriann Noble\
Murray, UT
Garwood dearly loved his time spent in the goat-house, where he could
court Thordia-- regaling her with his prowess at treating goat-udder
growths, shoveling manure like a nuclear chemist trying to bottle the
Christmas spirit, and making the precious fermented limburger of the
lactate goat secretions.
Brendan Wright\
Portland, OR
Winner: Science Fiction#
Long, long ago in a galaxy far away, in General Hospital born I was, and quite happy were my parents, but when a youngling still I was, moved we did.#
Mary Potts\
Oneco, Fl
Spy: Winner#
The double agent looked up from his lunch of Mahi-Mahi and couscous and realized that he must escape from Walla Walla to Bora Bora to come face-to-face with his arch enemy by taking out his 30-30 and shooting off his nemesis\' ear-to-ear grin so he could wave bye-bye to this duplicitous life, but the chances of him pulling this off were only so-so, much less than 50-50.#
Charles Jaworski\
North Pole, AK
Winner: Vile Puns#
Falcon was her name and she was quite the bird of prey, sashaying past her adolescent admirers from one anchor store to another, past the kiosks where earrings longed to lie upon her lobes and sunglasses hoped to nestle on her nose, seemingly the beginning of a beautiful friendship with whomsoever caught the eye of the mall tease, Falcon.#
Jay Dardenne\
Baton Rouge, LA
Runner-Up:#
Max thought the night-time burglary at the California surfing museum would be a safe caper, but that was before he spotted the security cop riding a bull mastiff, blond hair blowing in the wind, and noticed the blue-and-white sign wired to the cyclone fence, \"Guard dude on doggy.\"#
Jim Dehn\
Clovis, CA
Winner: Western#
As soon as Sherriff Russell heard Bradshaw say, \"This town ain\'t big enough for the both of us,\" he inadvertantly visualized a tiny chalk-line circle with a town sign that said \'population 1,\' and the two of them both trying to stand inside of it rather ineffectively, leaning this way and that, trying to keep their balance without stepping outside of the line, and that was why he was smiling when Bradshaw shot him.#
Keriann Noble\
Murray, UT
Runner-Up:#
It was high noon as Dusty rode into town, slumped low in the saddle on a horse so blinded by thirst from their long days in the desert that you could follow their slow shuffle to the local tavern by the hollow sound of a horse head against the worn clapboard buildings that lined the town\'s only road.#
Chip Haynes\
Clearwater, FL
Miscellaneous Dishonorable Mentions#
For the fifteenth time that evening my narcoleptic lover opened his eyes, smiled at me, and said, \"Good morning!\"#
Becca Mallary\
Bradford, VT
The assassin drew his dagger - a simple line drawing in black ink on
rose-tinted vellum.
Mike Bender\
Portland, OR
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.
Lawrence Person\
Austin, TX
Derwin Thoryndike vowed to place a 14-carat engagement ring on the
finger of Glenda-Sue Ellington, so now all he had to do was save up
enough money to buy the ring, get it inscribed, and then locate a person
named Glenda-Sue Ellington and convince her to marry him.
Harvey McCluskey\
Vancouver WA
James found \"Spider-Man 2\" to be quite an average movie, like a
superhero episode of \"Dawson\'s Creek,\" but not from the excellent
first season, nor from the horrible final seasons, but rather from
somewhere in the mid-run of the show, when it wasn\'t as good as it used
to be but it didn\'t totally suck yet.
Edo Steinberg\
Beer-Sheva, Israel
Rocko Gallante was as slick as a broken egg on a linoleum floor and as
polished as a Washington apple that had been spit on and rubbed to a
gleaming finish on the tail of a very clean shirt.
Claudia Fields\
Santa Barbara, CA
I peeled my body off the alcohol-soaked carpet, spat the cigarette butts
out of my mouth, licked my lips with a tongue that felt and tasted like
a rat that had been lightly sauteed in lighter fluid, and after
struggling to what a quick visual inspection confirmed were apparently
my feet, decided that the next time a seven- foot-tall Lebanese
fisherman called Bottomless Mary challenged me to an ouzo-drinking
contest I wouldn\'t wear suede shoes.
Geoff Blackwell\
Bundaberg QLD Australia
They ask me if it was dark that night the hyenas showed up and ate the
little beagle as he sat typing away on his dog house and then ate all
the little round-faced kids, and I tell \'em, \"no,\" it was not even
stormy, kind of a calm, half-moon lit night where you\'d sit on your
deck having some peanuts, until the hyenas arrived of course and then it
got so noisy you had to go in the house.
Bill Crowley\
Santa Rosa, CA
It was Angela\'s 96th birthday party, and as she leaned over to blow out
the candles on her cake and thought back on her long, long life, the
children she\'d given birth to, the man she had married and then sadly
buried, she thought to herself, well no matter what at least I\'ve grown
old with dignity, then the nursing home attendant pointed out that her
breasts were dipping in the trifle bowl again.
Micheal Rossiter\
Usworth, Washington, Tyne and Wear\
England
A warning to the reader: Tom dies in the end of the story so don\'t get
too attached to him.
Sam Gerring\
Lexington, KY
\"So you see\" concluded Lance \"there are certain things that every
woman regardless of personal situation should do at least once in their
lives and I am foremost amongst these things.\"
Hywel Curtis\
Abercarn, Caerphilly\
Wales
During the entire exhilarating, bright and lively day in the summer of
the year, when the clouds passed like cotton puffs high in the heavens,
I had been passing alone, in my Alfa Romeo, through exceptionally
appealing countryside; and finally found myself, in the gloaming of the
day, within view of the cheery prospect of the House of Sol Asher, my
old friend and haberdasher. (Apologies to E.A.P.)
Gordon Grant\
Savannah, GA
Charles stuck his head out the window, not fully realizing that the salt
air and warm breeze would have no beneficial effect on a head severed
and shrunk in Borneo and sold on a stick to tourists in Bali, and with
little thought of the irony of the former missionary\'s vacant gaze on a
nude beach with at least two couples in the missionary position.
Mark D. Harmon\
Knoxville, TN
Anyone with a less refined air of unabashed insouciance would not have
been able to so easily slip through the security cordon, charm their way
past the armed guards, breeze through the marbled reception area and
blithely enter the inner sanctum of the UN Security Council and there
successfully negotiate an end to all conflict in the Middle East, but
that was the sort of man Nigel Simpkins was.
David Lindley\
Sheffield\
England
We crossed America that week, the red states melding into the blue
states like stomped grapes along our route, leaving our tires with a
stain not unlike the stains on Lucy Ricardo\'s feet when she stomped
grapes during the \"I Love Lucy\" episode in which the Ricardos and the
Mertzes visited Italy.
Audrey Jordan\
Hope, IN
You could tell it was going to be a perfect beach day, maybe the best
one all summer -- when the air is the temperature of a gymnasium locker
room and the sea sways over the dunes like a yoga instructor doing the
downward facing dog.
Rita Kasperek\
Oakland, CA
She was standing weepily at her father\'s grave in the old family
cemetery, where the ancient headstones tipped and tumbled like a flock
of spring lambs, when she raised her weary eyes to see a shirtless man,
his mighty thighs clutching the loins of a raging steed whose breath
came hot as a desert wind, and made a mental note to get her hairdryer
repaired.
Nancy Lee\
Chapel Hill, NC
The wheel of love had left its treadmarks in his chest once too often,
like a knobby mud tire on a monster truck, or like a really big ponce
wheel, the kind that tailors use to punch little holes in patterns and
that would leave lots of nasty little welts if you were to run it up and
down your arm.
Peter Loughlin\
Santa Rosa CA
She was independent and impetuous and winning her heart would be like
capturing lightning in a bottle, not the plastic kind that is prevalent
everywhere today but the glass kind that I used to buy cr�me soda in at
the service station, when they were actually SERVICE STATIONS, two
blocks from my house back in the 50\'s and early 60\'s and I would
return them for two cents deposit which was a quick source of income
back then because my allowance was only ten cents a week.
Mario Martinez\
San Jose, Ca.
In considering the wisdom of entering upon an affair of the heart with
the redoubtable Miss Ffiona Sensuosa, MacFadden Perfidy weighed the
undeniable erotic advantages of such a confluence of physiologically
coinciding characteristics against the demonstrably unfortunate fact of
her exhibiting pronounced advantages over him in terms of wealth,
intelligence and personality, and concluded that their union could
possibly be inadvisable.
Stuart K. Allison\
Driffield, East Riding of Yorkshire\
England