🚀 go-pugleaf

Announcing: Big $50 Grand Prize: 
The First Annual Wretched Beginner's Fiction Contest!

I'm looking for the worst short story you ever wrote. Sentimental?
Implausible? Maudlin? Trite? Laughable? Pretentious? Are the
characters stiff and morbid, with inscrutable motivations? Are they
mere mouthpieces for some agenda? Does the story use lots of
exclamation points, or words like "tendril" and "entropy"? Does the
narrator's girlfriend, boyfriend, grandmother, and/or dog die? Did you
forget to describe anything, except maybe one line like "the room
smelled bad"? In short, is your story wretched?

Well, at least you recognize it now. And maybe it's the worst story
ever written, and/or you can make an easy fifty bucks with it.

No parodies of bad fiction, or otherwise intentionally bad work,
please! Earnest efforts only! The more earnest, the better!

  Deadline: July 30, 1995

  Grand Prize: $50 and publication via Usenet and WWW, with
     appropriate fanfare. Anonymity respected upon request.

No fee, of course. Multiple submissions *encouraged*. All genuinely
bad entries will be offered possible anthology publication, with
payment in copies. (Anonymity respected there, too.)

Send your submission via e-mail or US Mail to:

   Scott Southwick (scotty@bluemarble.net)
   PO Box 2493
   Bloomington, IN 47401

Remember: a rejection slip from this contest would be a compliment!

[Please feel free to print and post this notice, or otherwise
distribute outside Usenet, at will.]