Sherry Chandler

Jim Guigli of Carmichael, California is the winner of the 24th annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. The Bulwer-Lytton competition is named for the Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873). The goal of the contest is to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels. Bulwer-Lytton opened his novel Paul Clifford (1830) with the immortal words “It was a dark and stormy night,” hence the name of the contest.

This year’s winning opener runs thus:

Detective Bart Lasiter was in his office studying the light from his one small window falling on his super burrito when the door swung open to reveal a woman whose body said you’ve had your last burrito for a while, whose face said angels did exist, and whose eyes said she could make you dig your own grave and lick the shovel clean.

Femme fatale, indeed.

Thanks to The Kentucky Literary Newsletter for the link.

Shakespeare’s 22nd and a cat.

22

My glass shall not persuade me I am old,
So long as youth and thou are of one date;
But when in thee time’s furrows I behold,
Then look I death my days should expiate.
For all that beauty that doth cover thee
Is but the seemly raiment of my heart,
Which in thy breast doth live, as thine in me:
How can I then be elder than thou art?
O, therefore, love, be of thyself so wary
As I, not for myself, but for thee will;
Bearing thy heart, which I will keep so chary
As tender nurse her babe from faring ill.
Presume not on thy heart when mine is slain;
Thou gavest me thine, not to give back again.

For catblogging YouTube fun today, see I See Invisible People.