Fwd: [Fwd: Lovers of Great Literature] (fwd)

I've seen some of these before, but the full list is quite funny.


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Subject: Lovers of Great Literature
Date:    4/21/98 10:56 AM


	Since 1983 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.  This contest was inspired by the writer 
Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, whose famous opener in his book Paul 
Clifford remains one of the most notorious in literature: "It was a dark 
and stormy night."

Below are the contest winners since 1983...  

The camel died quite suddenly on the second day, and Selena fretted 
sulkily and, buffing her already impeccable nails--not for the first time 
since the journey began--pondered snidely if this would dissolve into a 
vignette of minor inconveniences like all the other holidays spent with 
Basil.
        --Gail Cain, San Francisco, California (1983 Winner)  

The lovely woman-child Kaa was mercilessly chained to the cruel post of 
the warrior-chief Beast, with his barbarous tribe now stacking wood at 
her nubile feet, when the strong, clear voice of the poetic and heroic 
Handsomas roared, "Flick your Bic, crisp that chick, and you'll feel my 
steel through your last meal."
        --Steven Garman, Pensacola, Florida (1984 Winner)  

The countdown had stalled at T minus 69 seconds when Desiree, the first 
female ape to go up in space, winked at me slyly and pouted her thick, 
rubbery lips unmistakably--the first of many such advances during what 
would prove to be the longest, and most memorable, space voyage of my career.
        --Martha Simpson, Glastonbury, Connecticut (1985 Winner)  

The bone-chilling scream split the warm summer night in two, the first 
half being before the scream when it was fairly balmy and calm and 
pleasant for those who hadn't heard the scream at all, but not calm or 
balmy or even very nice for those who did hear the scream, discounting 
the little period of time during the actual scream itself when your ears 
might have been hearing it but your brain wasn't reacting yet to let you 
know.
        --Patricia E. Presutti, Lewiston, New York (1986 Winner)  

The notes blatted skyward as the sun rose over the Canada geese, 
feathered rumps mooning the day, webbed appendages frantically peddling 
unseen bicycles in their search for sustenance, driven by Nature's maxim, 
"Ya wanna eat, ya gotta work," and at last I knew Pittsburgh.
        --Sheila B. Richter, Minneapolis, Minnesota (1987 Winner)  

Like an expensive sports car, fine-tuned and well-built, Portia was 
sleek, shapely, and gorgeous, her red jumpsuit molding her body, which 
was as warm as the seatcovers in July, her hair as dark as new tires, her 
eyes flashing like bright hubcaps, and her lips as dewy as the beads of 
fresh rain on the hood; she was a woman driven--fueled by a single 
accelerant--and she needed a man, a man who wouldn't shift from his 
views, a man to steer her along the right road, a man like Alf Romeo.
        --Rachel E. Sheeley, Williamsburg, Indiana (1988 Winner)  

Professor Frobisher couldn't believe he had missed seeing it for so 
long--it was, after all, right there under his nose--but in all his years 
of research into the intricate and mysterious ways of the universe, he 
had never noticed that the freckles on his upper lip, just below and to 
the left of the nostril, partially hidden until now by a hairy mole he 
had just removed a week before, exactly matched the pattern of the stars 
in the Pleides, down to the angry red zit that had just popped up where 
he and his colleagues had only today discovered an exploding nova.
        --Ray C. Gainey, Indianapolis, Indiana (1989 Winner)  

Dolores breezed along the surface of her life like a flat stone forever 
skipping across smooth water, rippling reality sporadically but oblivious 
to it consistently, until she finally lost momentum, sank, and due to an 
overdose of fluoride as a child which caused her to lie forever on the 
floor of her life as useless as an appendix and as lonely as a 
five-hundred-pound barbell in a steroid-free fitness center.
        --Linda Vernon, Newark, California (1990 Winner)  
  
Sultry it was and humid, but no whisper of air caused the plump, laden 
spears of golden grain to nod their burdened heads as they unheedingly 
awaited the cyclic rape of their gleaming treasure, while overhead the 
burning orb of luminescence ascended its ever-upward path toward a 
sweltering celestial apex, for although it is not in Kansas that our  
story takes place, it looks godawful like it.
        --Judy Frazier, Lathrop, Missouri (1991 Winner)

As the newest Lady Turnpot descended into the kitchen wrapped only in her 
celery-green dressing gown, her creamy bosom rising and falling like a 
temperamental souffle, her tart mouth pursed in distaste, the sous-chef 
whispered to the scullery boy, "I don't know what to make of her."
        --Laurel Fortuner, Montendre, France (1992 Winner)  

She wasn't really my type, a hard-looking but untalented reporter from 
the local cat box liner, but the first second that the third-rate 
representative of the fourth estate cracked open a new fifth of old 
Scotch, my sixth sense said seventh heaven was as close as an eighth-note 
from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, so, nervous as a tenth grader drowning 
in eleventh-hour cramming for a physics exam, I swept her into my longing 
arms, and, humming "The Twelfth of Never," I got lucky on Friday the 
thirteenth.
        --"Buddy" Ocheltree, Port Townsend, Washington (1993 Winner)  

As the fading light of a dying day filtered through the window blinds, 
Roger stood over his victim with a smoking .45, surprised at the serenity 
that filled him after pumping six slugs into the bloodless tyrant that 
mocked him day after day, and then he shuffled out of the office with one 
last look back at the shattered computer terminal lying there like a 
silicon armadillo left to rot on the information superhighway.
        --Larry Brill, Austin, Texas (1994 Winner)  

Paul Revere had just discovered that someone in Boston was a spy for the 
British, and when he saw the young woman believed to be the spy's 
girlfriend in an Italian restaurant he said to the waiter, "Hold the 
spumoni--I'm going to follow the chick an' catch a Tory."
        --John L. Ashman, Houston, Texas (1995 Winner)  

"Ace, watch your head!" hissed Wanda urgently, yet somehow provocatively, 
through red, full, sensuous lips; but he couldn't you know, since nobody 
can actually watch more than part of his nose or a little cheek or lips 
if he really tries, but he appreciated her warning.
        --Janice Estey, Aspen, Colorado (1996 Winner)  

The moment he laid eyes on the lifeless body of the nude socialite 
sprawled across the bathroom floor, Detective Leary knew she had 
committed suicide by grasping the cap on the tamper-proof bottle, pushing 
down and twisting while she kept her thumb firmly pressed against the 
spot the arrow pointed to, until she hit the exact spot where the tab 
clicks into place, allowing her to remove the cap and swallow the entire 
contents of the bottle, thus ending her life.
        -- Artie Kalemeris, Fairfax, VA (1997 Winner)