Friday, 2 July 2010

Bad Writing?


A thirsty gerbil's kiss takes out the best bad writing of 2010 competition

A romance book's opening line about a gerbil has won a bad writing award run by a US College / James Croucher Source: Supplied

AN unseemly sentence that compares a kiss to the union of a thirsty gerbil and a giant water bottle has won the top prize in an annual bad writing contest.

San Jose State University said today Molly Ringle of Seattle was the grand prize winner of the 2010 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, which the university has sponsored since 1982.

In her winning entry, Ms Ringle wrote: "For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity's affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss - a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity's mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world's thirstiest gerbil."

The literary competition honours the memory of 19th English century writer Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton, who famously opened his 1830 novel Paul Clifford, with the much-quoted, "It was a dark and stormy night".

Steve Lynch of San Marcos, California, won the detective category: "She walked into my office wearing a body that would make a man write bad (cheques), but in this paperless age you would first have to obtain her ABA Routing Transit Number and Account Number and then disable your own Overdraft Protection in order to do so."

Linda Boatright of Omaha won the Western category: "He walked into the bar and bristled when all eyes fell upon him - perhaps because his build was so short and so wide, or maybe it was the odour that lingered about him from so many days and nights spent in the wilds, but it may just have been because no one had ever seen a porcupine in a bar before."

Read more: http://www.news.com.au/world/a-thirsty-gerbils-kiss-takes-out-the-best-bad-writing-of-2010-competition/story-e6frfkyi-1225886273210#ixzz0sJZ4QaIH

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