Word: lytton
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...there can be glitches: "Rosemary's word processor is on the blink and she is not getting the sort of scenes that Rogue Duke needs. But Redbook is pressing her. So Rosemary tries to dredge up some Georgette Heyer channel-packet stuff. Instead Rosemary gets a Bulwer-Lytton trireme, by mistake...
Deprived multitudes who do not know that a trireme was a three-tiered galley and Edward George Bulwer-Lytton was the author of The Last Days of Pompeii may have more luck with the gummy red spaceship that moves around the outskirts of Duluth. It contains a race of highly competent centipedes who can change themselves into beautiful women or Hubert Humphrey. The aliens do not threaten the commonweal nearly as much as do the Aztec Terrorists Society, a black drug dealer named Big John and Police Lieutenant Darlene Ecks, who enjoys strip-searching suspects...
...Call me Ishmael"? No, far too good. "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . ."? A beauty, a classic-but all wrong for the Second Annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, which asks contestants to try their hand at composing truly atrocious opening sentences to hypothetical bad novels. Says San Jose State University English Professor Scott Rice: "We want the kind of writing that makes the reader...
Founded by Rice, who has enlisted the assistance of fellow professors to judge the entries (some 700 so far), the contest was named in dishonor of poor Edward G.E.L. Bulwer-Lytton. A popular and workmanlike 19th century British novelist, Bulwer-Lytton wrote a book, Paul Clifford, that unfortunately began, "It was a dark and stormy night. . ." Among the exquisitely bad sentences sent to the California (zip code: 95192) judges: "Screaming like a banshee, bargaining like a waterfront drug dealer, bleeding like a side of beef in an abattoir, the Chinese sailor croaked out one word: 'Firelight' (a code...
...contest, Rice says, is a perverse but true test of talent: "You have to know what is good before you can write something truly awful." Why would anyone vie for the Bulwer-Lytton prize? Jokes Rice: "They want the chance to become a household name." Contest deadline: April...