Site of the Day for Friday, January 18, 2002
Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest
The List has found the very thing to enliven the winter blahs which some of
its gentle members may be experiencing - a fiction writing contest,
sponsored by an august institution of higher learning. This is no ordinary
contest however. At the "Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest . . . www. means
Wretched Writers Welcome".
"Since 1982 the English Department at San Jose State University has
sponsored the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, a whimsical literary
competition that challenges entrants to compose the opening sentence to the
worst of all possible novels. The contest (hereafter referred to as the
BLFC) was the brainchild (or Rosemary's baby) of Professor Scott Rice,
whose graduate school excavations unearthed the source of the line "It was
a dark and stormy night." Sentenced to write a seminar paper on a minor
Victorian novelist, he chose the man with the funny hyphenated name, Edward
George Bulwer-Lytton, who was best known for perpetrating The Last Days of
Pompeii, . . . and--not least--Paul Clifford, whose famous opener has been
plagiarized repeatedly by the cartoon beagle Snoopy." - from the website
The website itself is no mere recitation of the contest rules, although it
does contain all the pertinent data. There is a carillon of delightful
trivia, with attendant links to relevant sites. You may feel so chuffed
after spending some time there that you, too, may become one of the
entrants.
Scrawl your way to this witty and beguiling website for an upbeat to your
Friday.
http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/
A.M. Holm
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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