The 2008 Lyttle Lytton Contest #

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The 2008 Winners

Because they had not repented, the angel stabbed the unrepentant couple thirteen times, with its sword.

Sophi broke down in tears, like a diesel car that had run out of petrol.

Karina Kantas

Her face, though scalded, was as lily-white as I could ever want as we jovially kissed.

Lucus Keppel

Portia, distracted, brushed the fetlocks of her steed, murmuring softly.

Miles Wilson

The Ramadan tree was lit, and Aladdin joyfully sat around it.

Mary Potts

Queen Elizabeth sat alone, wondering when Napoleon was gonna get there.

Jennian Leister

That one actually went on for another sentence, but it was one of those “ha ha, I repeated something” jokes. There were other sentences that improved greatly upon editing:

This story is a murder mystery—the mystery of a murder.

Guy Hungerford

That one’s even better if you do the voice. “The mystery… of a MURDER!”

John Gantry surveyed the grim aftermath of battle through the aft porthole.

Walt Freitag

That one should be totally innocuous, and yet “aft porthole” sounds gross.

Hussein read the agent’s TSA badge, gently grazed his strong hand with hers, and whispered two words that would change her love life forever.

Nathan von Colditz

Liz Trundy burst onto the stage to the wild applause of her fellow Mary Kay comrades, unaware that the wildest applause came from Digby Jones, NFL punt receiver, who had never let himself forget her.

Erin Spradlin

Bob is sad. :(

Mozell Gibbons

Under Bob’s fez was another.

Jeff Marr

I like that one because it feels like it’s missing a word, but then it takes a moment to figure out what it would be, and then once you’ve figured it out you realize that adding it would make the sentence even worse. I don’t know why that kind of conundrum amuses me, but it does.

As Lucas hunkered in the shadows waiting for his name to be called he fiddled with his cuff links, praying that this time his knife thrusts would be sufficient.

Brian Derksen

I may have chosen that one in large part because it feels like an ever-so-slight parody of the book I’m currently reading. (The Confusion. I’m somewhere in the mid-300s right now. So, less than halfway. Sigh.)

FUCK. I scream and pound my monitor so hard it stops functioning for four minutes, but I’m not using it anyway. I’m crying.

Ken Carfox

PEWPEW—Lasers!—PEWPEWPEW!

David Poore

The thing is, you can never really tell if a person is looking out from behind their own eyes, or if the eyes are being piloted by tiny mice in swivel-chairs.

Noah Smith

Sadly, Jim retracted his penis; it obviously wasn’t welcome here.

Alex Burleson

Sleep was about to clutch my eyes, when suddenly the text rang through my head. Peering at my phone I saw, “WTF? LMAO!” and I could not help but smile.

Jackie Goodman

On to the Found contest. A number of these were submitted anonymously, including the winner:

Tears are permanent when you tattoo them to your face.

espn.com, 2007.1024
quoted anonymously

Tune your ear to the frequency of despair, and cross-reference by the longitude and latitude of a heart in agony.

Amazing Spider-Man #544
quoted anonymously

Egad. That may well be the single worst sentence I have ever read. I have never been more thankful that I don’t currently read Amazing Spider-Man. Again, it’s trying so hard for lyrical pathos and falling so very, very flat. It looks like the recipe here is “Add two parts nerdy, inappropriate metaphors to one part steamingly purple prose; mix poorly.” So where’s the humor? I guess it’s the bitter, cosmic jest that we live in a universe where someone got paid for this.

At the risk of exposing myself to that dreadful epithet, unorthodox, I am jumping feet-first with you into the past tense.

Madrigal’s Magic Key to Spanish
quoted by Daniel Koning

I was iffy on this one until I actually followed the rules of my own contest and imagined it as the first sentence of a novel. Like, take any novel written in the past tense, and attach this to the beginning. Ha ha ha!

I observed this wheelchair dude in the vestibule. He was waiting for me.

sample sentence from Apple Thesaurus
adapted by Rui Pires

With the backbreaking work of the Gold Rush came massage techniques from across the globe.

The 2008 Lyttle Lytton Contest#

The 2008 Lyttle Lytton Contest #