Words fail me

[mdlbear]

The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest 2005 Results.

I particularly like the subtlety of the Grand Panjandrum's Special Award. Sorry, I've owned a car with dual Strombergs. The Fantasy runner-up isn't half bad, either -- I've often felt like that.

Comments

[braider.livejournal.com]

Wow. I nearly spit my ceral on the screen when I read the Grand Panjandrum's Special Award.

[sdorn.livejournal.com]

Alas, I lost the contest, even though I thought it was the best use of "impact" as a transitive verb:

Leaning backwards over the balcony after three glasses of Merlot, the dean suddenly found himself dropping into the courtyard like a delinquent duck shot by a vigilante Supreme Court justice, landing squarely on students about to be honored for making the Provost's List and finally realizing his public ambition of impacting college students in a lifelong way.

Or maybe I should say my work was not recognized or (dis)honored?

[madfilkentist]

One sentence from the linked page could itself have been entered in a bad writing competition:

Although best known for "The Last Days of Pompeii" (1834), which has been made into a movie three times, originating the expression "the pen is mightier than the sword," and phrases like "the great unwashed" and "the almighty dollar," Bulwer-Lytton opened his novel Paul Clifford (1830) with the immortal words that the "Peanuts" Beagle Snoopy plagiarized for years, "It was a dark and stormy night."

I seriously doubt that The Last Days of Pompeii said anything about dollars, almighty or otherwise.