The Bulwer-Lytton winners!

Each year, I love to read the ghastly (but extremely clever) opening sentences created by the winners of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. This year's grand prize ($250) winner is from Washington, DC (a place where we know they write good fiction!) and his winning sentence is:

"Theirs was a New York love, a checkered taxi ride burning rubber, and like the city their passion was open 24/7, steam rising from their bodies like slick streets exhaling warm, moist, white breath through manhole covers stamped 'Forged by DeLaney Bros., Piscataway, N.J."

This is the 26th year for this international literary parody contest and among the category winners are some sentences I really enjoyed:

Winner---Adventure: Leopold looked up at the arrow piercing the skin of the dirigible with a sort of wondrous dismay -- the wheezy shriek was just the sort of sound he always imagined a baby moose being beaten with a pair of accordions might make. (from New Hampshire!)

Winner---Children's Literature: Joanne watched her fellow passengers - a wizened man reading about alchemy; an oversized bearded man-child; a haunted, bespectacled young man with a scar; and a gaggle of private school children who chatted ceaselessly about Latin and flying around the hockey pitch and the two-faced teacher who they thought was a witch - there was a story here, she decided.

Runner-Up--- Spy Fiction: The KGB agent known only as the Spider, milk solids oozing from his mouth and nose, surveyed the spreading wound in his abdomen caused by the crushing blow of the low but deadly hassock and begged of his attacker to explain why she gone to the trouble of feeding him tainted milk products before effecting his assassination with such an inferior object as this ottoman, only to hear in his dying moments an escaping Miss Muffet of the MI-5 whisper, "it is my whey."

Winner---Vile Puns: Vowing revenge on his English teacher for making him memorize Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality," Warren decided to pour sugar in her gas tank, but he inadvertently grabbed a sugar substitute so it was actually Splenda in the gas.

If you like this kind of stuff (and obviously I do!) see them all at: http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/scott.rice/blfc2008.htm and feel free to create your own opening sentence for this post!