Bad Fiction
San Jose, California:
For a Georgia baker, winning top honors in the annual Bulwer-Lytton contest for bad fiction was in the numbers.
William W. "Buddy" Ocheltree, 39, of Lilburn, Ga., submitted the winning entry announced Wednesday in the 12th annual competition, a send-up of hard-boiled detective fiction:
"She really wasn't my type - a hard-looking, untalented
reporter for the local cat-box liner; but the first
second that third-rate representative of the fourth
estate cracked open a new fifth of 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
while humming 'The Twelfth Of Never,' I got lucky on
Friday the thirteenth."
Scott Rice, a professor of English at San Jose State
University, said Ocheltree "prefers that his entry be
read with a Humphrey Bogart voice."
The winner was chosen from more than 8,000 entries from
all over the United States as well as Britain, Germany,
South Africa, Japan, Australia and Saudi Arabia.
Rice said Ocheltree will receive "a cheap word
processor" as his prize.
The bad writing contest, named for Victorian novelist
Edward Bulwer- Lytton, challenges writers to top his
opening line to "Paul Clifford": "It was a dark and
stormy night."
The winner of the science fiction category, Tom Butler
of Tallahassee, Fla., cast off the high-tech terms
common to that genre in favor simpler language:
"Those alarm things that make a real loud honking kind
of noise were going off as Captain James Hurley stared
at the screen that showed him the stuff outside in
space, while he sat in the chair that the captain sits
in and slowly reached for the control panel for the
thing that makes the ship go real fast."
Richard Patching, of Calgary, Alberta, submitted the
opening line that was the best of the worst in the
adventure genre:
"As the finely honed points of the magnificent bull
elk's antlers perforated his spleen, lungs and lower
colon, Lenny the Grifter wished he had stayed working
the street in Times Square, instead of going up to the
Rockies where this dumb animal had figured out that
three-card monte was a con, and gored him."
An entry from Marc Roberge of Santa Rosa, Calif., was
chosen in the "special multicultural category":
"Try as he might, Guido Smith could not get into the
spirit of Oktoberfest this year; his laissez-faire cum
manana attitude made him want to say sayonara to the
whole shebang."
Rick Vetter of Riverside, Calif., took one of three
"miscellaneous dishonorable mentions":
"Brenda Malthwit: attorney at law, young, attractive,
well educated, and full of self-confidence; a woman
who, as swiftly as her lascivious male co-workers
undressed her with their eyes, would mentally fold the
clothes neatly and put them in a pile."
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