May 23, 2010

Bulwer-Lytton and bullshittin'

Every year, there's a bad-fiction contest in honour of Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, whose chief claim to fame is the opening line to his 1830 novel Paul Clifford, which begins, "It was a dark and stormy night."

The goal is to write a deliberately bad opening line to a novel; in other words, to be the best at being the worst. I'm tossing around the idea of submitting this for next year's contest:

It was day three of the epic Hell’s Angels Long Weekend Keg-O-Rama, and spirits were running high—literally and figuratively, as it turned out, when a 340-pound golem of flesh and facial hair named Gord MacDonald shrieked, “I LIVE WITH THE HAMMER COCKED AND THE SAFETY OFF!” his vast beergut jiggling and ham-fists outthrust, one clutching a .357 Magnum and the other a near-empty bottle of Jack Daniels, the remaining contents sprinkling the crowd like a boozy blessing until, the liquor finally spent, he slammed the bottle into the left side of his head, the impact causing his trigger finger to twitch and the gun to blow off the right side, prompting a nearby observer to remark, “Guess he dies that way too.”

1 comment:

Pink Lemonade said...

Sounds like something that could happen at your old place! Did it?? (crossing my fingers!)