Friday, March 28, 2014

A Very Merry Unbirthday Contest

Hello everyone! I hope you have all had splendidly awesome weeks!

This week Normally Surreal turns one year old! You know what that means?


As a way to say thank you to all of my followers, commentators and people who ended up here by mistake, I have decided to run a little contest.

It is true that it is difficult to write well, but it can be just has hard to write terribly. That is why there are contests, such as the famed Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, to find people who can skillfully craft a terrible work of fiction.

For instance the 2011 winner of the Bulwer-Lytton won with this entry:

"Cheryl’s mind turned like the vanes of a wind-powered turbine, chopping her sparrow-like thoughts into bloody pieces that fell onto a growing pile of forgotten memories." — Sue Fondrie, Oshkosh, WI

Human/Velociraptor Not Included
The rules of this contest are simple, write one terrible opening line to a story and post it in the comments below or on the contest announcement pinned to the top of my Facebook page. Two weeks from now, I will pick a winner to receive a signed copy of "Life is a Circus Run by a Platypus!"

So show me your creative writing side, and don't worry if it's bad, that's the point!

Thanks again to everyone who has followed me through the bizarre journey that is my life for the past year! You guys are more fantastic than the thought of a thousand wombats playing "Carry on My Wayward Son" on harmonicas!

As always, feel free to follow my exploits on Facebook, Twitter and Goodreads!

8 comments:

  1. She felt as happy as pink glittery puppies sparkling in the sun.

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  2. The night was moist. - Brian Patrick McKinley, author of "Ancient Blood: A Novel of the Hegemony."

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  3. A grey pall of boredom--not the ordinary boredom one might experience while listening to another of Uncle Chet's long-winded tales of his glory days in the San Jose Police motor pool maintenance crew, but a rather more sudden and intense lack of stimulation, like a kind of waking narcolepsy--failed to fall over the room (as might have been anticipated under the circumstances), for Jolly Jim Fitch had arrived quite unexpectedly (after having maintained emphatically for days--as he often did--that he would not do so), bearing liquor and ribald anecdotes, a welcome departure from the proceedings thus far, but one which would ultimately prove as disappointingly dull as the surface of a piece of unfinished furniture left in the driveway of an abandoned tenement for a couple of months during a rainy spell even wetter than the rainy spells to which we were now so accustomed since the atomic bomb blast which had leveled our city, altering the weather, not to mention apparently touching off the zombie apocalypse Uncle Chet had so often warned us about.

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  4. Ralph likened love to a jai alai game in which the walls had been replaced by wickets, the lines were painted with lipstick and roll-on deodorant, and the ball was a potpourri-filled pumpkin.

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  6. The waiting room smelled like cheap air freshener, fake rose and sickly sweet vanilla, mixed with the lingering scent of hopelessness as Tiffany and Pierce sat separated by loathing and distrust on a blue, faded couch.

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  7. His gnarled wizard's staff jiggled sensually into her bereft cave of solitude as her secrets unfolded before him, tattered, torn.

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  8. D.L. Mackenzie, in case you didn't see today's blog post, you won the contest. If I could snag your address at platypusringmaster@gmail.com I will send you your book! Thanks to everyone who entered, they were all awesomely awful!

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