🚀 go-pugleaf

Dear Readers,

A regular reader of Musea,  Melanie, sent me this
list of the ten Winners of the Dark and Stormy Night,
bad writing  contest - and I couldn't resist resending it
to you.
It is named after Bulwer-Lytton who started one of his
novels with the line,
"It was a dark and stormy night."  The list is
from the English Dept. of San Jose State U. Enjoy.
____________________

This year's 10 winners of the Bulwer-Lytton contest,
wherein one writes only the first line of a bad novel:

 10) "As a scientist, Throckmorton knew that if he
 were ever to break wind in the echo chamber, he
 would never hear the end of it."

 9) "Just beyond the Narrows, the river widens."

 8) "With a curvaceous figure that Venus would have
 envied, a  tanned, unblemished oval face framed with
 lustrous thick brown  hair,  deep azure-blue eyes
 fringed with long black lashes, perfect teeth that
 vied for competition, and a small straight nose,
 Marilee had a beauty that defied description."

 7) "Andre, a simple peasant, had only one thing on
 his mind as he crept along the East wall: 'Andre
 creep... Andre creep... Andre creep.'"

 6) "Stanislaus Smedley, a man always on the cutting
 edge of narcissism, was about to give his body and
 soul to a back alley sex-change surgeon to become
 the woman he loved."

 5) "Although Sarah had an abnormal fear of mice, it
 did not keep her from eeking out a living at a local
 pet store."

 4) "Stanley looked quite bored and somewhat
 detached, but then penguins often do."

 3) "Like an over-ripe beefsteak tomato rimmed with
 cottage cheese, the corpulent remains of Santa Claus
 lay dead on the hotel floor."

 2) "Mike Hardware was the kind of private eye who
 didn't know the meaning of the word 'fear'; a man
 who could laugh in the face of danger and spit in
 the eye of death -- in short, a moron with suicidal
 tendencies."

 AND THE WINNER IS...

 1) "The sun oozed over the horizon, shoved aside
 darkness, crept along the greensward, and, with
 sickly fingers, pushed through the castle window,
 revealing the pillaged princess, hand at throat,
 crown asunder, gaping in frenzied horror at the
 sated, sodden amphibian lying beside her,
 disbelieving the magnitude of the frog's deception,
 screaming madly, 'You lied!"

_______
News: there's now a zinewikipedia. See
www.zinewiki.com

Tom Hendricks
ed. of the 14 year old zine Musea

musea.us
hunkasaurus.com
Myspace.com/musead
Myspace.com/hunkasauruscom
tomhendricks474@cs.com
Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Hendricks