RIP: The Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest - no more Dark and Stormy Nights

[thewayne]

English professor Scott E. Rice at San Jose State University has been managing the contest since 1983, named after the English novelist who was infamous for his purple prose, once beginning a novel with the famous phrase, 'It was a dark and stormy night.' The contest sought out such writing, and in its first year caught over TEN THOUSAND submissions!

Over the years, four books of excellent works were collected and published!

The professor is retiring the contest so that he can retire and enjoy some time while he still has it.

His daughter, EJ, helps with the contest and managing the web site, and is always welcoming of contributions to keep it going. Her Venmo is elizabeth_rice_12.

https://idle.slashdot.org/story/25/03/09/1740239/professor-ends-bulwer-lytton-bad-writing-contest-after-43-years


A collection of winning entries from 1996 to 2024 are available at their web site at:
https://www.bulwer-lytton.com/winners

Previous entries were lost in the sands of time, but may be found in the Wayback Machine. Some are collected in PDFs at the web site.


If you want to have some fun with very well-written bad writing, and probably a lot of clever puns, this is a good place to spend time. I have some of the four published books.

Comments

[disneydream06]

That's too bad that somebody couldn't keep it going. :(
Hugs, Jon

[thewayne]

Hopefully someone might pick it up, we'll just have to see.

[silveradept]

Ah, how difficult. A prize and contest such as that is the kind of thing that should continue on, and those who have been adjudicated as the best of the worst (or the worst of the worst) sporting such a designation with pride, because they tried very hard to suck that much.