Share your unselected Bulwer Lytton Submissions

[Sampiro]

Since it is now clear that the powers that be behind the Bulwer Lytton contest constitute yet another Axis of Evil and are clearly but pawns of the dark one, I invite other Dopers who submitted entries but did not send the required bribes, sexual favors, or supply the number of suicide bombers necessary to win the contest to submit any entries here.

Here’s one of mine:

True, she hadn’t been able to sing or drive or come inside the house for years, but unless the prematurely revealed rope and Lysol alerted her as to bath-night Big Meemaw was gentle as a dying kitten right up until the morning she shot the Jehovah’s Witness whence, like a drunk uncle in a pup tent, Fate stuck its hand down the pants of our contentment, but this time without giving us a washing machine after.

[sturmhauke]

Here are mine:

Inexorably – inasmuch as anything done by even a thoroughbred racing snail could be called “inexorable” – Xerxes – he and his son Darius were quite feared in the racing circuits (although Xerxes I of Persia was the son of Darius I, and they were not hermaphrodites) – began – while it may be difficult, due to the sluggishness of snails (conqueror’s names notwithstanding), for the layperson to perceive the precise moment between action and inaction, the expert can pluck this moment out from amidst its neighbors, as an osprey plucks a fish from a rocky stream – to move.

The sun flashed dramatically over Commander Smith’s shoulder, who wondered idly, as he stepped out onto the ruddy soil at the base of the spectacularly tall Olympus Mons, thus becoming the first human to set foot on Mars, whether he had properly filed his taxes.

Once upon a time, in a land of wretched villains and valiant yet somewhat inept heroes, of unspeakable horrors oft sung about by shabby minstrels in seedy taverns, of beauty so searing as to cook a 12 oz. porterhouse to perfection, there lived an old man of no particular note who died peacefully in his sleep.

[E.Thorp]

I submitted two:

The wet, naked light of dawn moistened the formica countertops like a lolling manx’s tongue, as the worm at the bottom of my tequila glass began, inexorably, to turn.

“How much?” asked Senator O’Byrne, fumbling in his pocket for what may have been a roll of crisp bills, of which he might slip one under the rickety diner table to spot me a second grapefruit juice and, faced with the prospect of kissing political doom on the lips, pucker up.

[susan]

I like my science soft and my women hard, so I wasn’t entirely displeased when she suddenly flourished her four electro-probes and struck the mating posture, her seductive bare forelegs rustling chitonously.

It wasn’t a bad day until Emily accidentally let Jesus into her heart.

(Scott Rice said that his wife liked this one.)

The house was as haunted as it was a Frank Lloyd Wright–which is to say, not at all.

[Moirai]

But, Sampiro, most people make up their submissions- you’re just using an actual Meemaw story!

ETA- and “like a drunk uncle in a pup tent” is my new favorite phrase! I love you, Jon…

[RiverRunner]

I hereby declare “inexorable” and its derivatives the Word Of The Year.
RR

[Chefguy]

@susan

(Scott Rice said that his wife liked this one.)

It made me laugh out loud.

[Boyo_Jim]

These are all my 2008 entries. Personally, I think some of these were better than some of the winners, but perhaps my ego is getting the better of me.
**You’d think I would be on antidepressants or dead at this stage of life – pushing 50 with no discernible accomplishments or even the semblance of a social life, and a job offering all the satisfaction of a prisoner at Auschwitz; yet here I am writing my autobiography, giddy with glee in the knowledge that some idiot has already agreed to publish this steamer and those of you reading it have lives more empty and pointless than my own.

A blond Cockney dude, ever funky, got held in jail kinda long, many nights, over
personal quirks related somehow to Uncle Vanya’s wonky xylophonic yellow zither.

Ringo’s horse Thunder was deaf as the post he was tied to and not much smarter – Ringo had shot so many men from horseback that Thunder’s eardrums had more holes than Ringo’s oldest blue jeans, and his brain sloshed around in his big ol’ head like stew in a chuck wagon rolling down the Oregon Trail.

During dawn, Deedee doesn’t do diddley: during day, Deedee dutifully doodles dayglow dadaist drawings: during dusk, Deedee dons dacron dancing duds.

Dan had a widespread reputation as a player, so much so that when he called his wife from New York and said he was riding on the Staten Island Ferry, her tired reply was, “I hope to God that means you’re on a boat.”

If you thought Bambi had a tough childhood, you haven’t heard the story about Snowball the baby seal and the man with the three pound ball peen hammer.

Seeing death off the starboard bow in the form of a rogue wave sweeping in, Marco the navigator began to calculate where his grave marker should be placed – a little to port and aft and about 5,000 feet down from his present position, which was… well, when he thought about navigational margins of error and continental drift and planetary rotation, and the orbit of the earth around the sun and the sun around the Milky Way, and galaxy’s trajectory outward from the original Big Bang, he finally appreciated the futility of his career choice – as a professional navigator and amateur cosmologist, Marco was the best equipped crewman on the ship to understand that he had no friggin’ clue exactly where he was: where he would be in another 30 seconds might just as well be called “up the creek” or “down the tubes” with as much accuracy as GPS coordinates

When I suggested that Mary Jo’s demeanor was sometimes less than lady-like, she screamed, “I’m gonna gut you, you sumbitch!” and attacked me with a steak knife until distracted by the sound of the audience shouting “WHEEL…OF…FORTUNE!” on the living room TV.

Like a demented Roomba repeatedly bumping against the same couch leg and plaintively sucking until the batteries ran down, Britney gyrated against the microphone stand.

As Gerald began to dig out, he pondered the reasons for his continued existence – the excessive modesty and weak bladder which had led him deep into the bowels of a cave to relieve himself moments before a massive volcanic eruption had devastated the landscape for miles around – and wished he had never heard that the interior of a cave was known as its bowels as he had begun to worry that going into bowels might mean he was gay; and had he expressed this concern aloud it would have been clear that whatever reasons there might be for his survival, quick wits were not among them.

Enchantingly beautiful Togo is tucked under West Africa like the ball sac on a fat guy.**

[capybara]

I like my science soft and my women hard, so I wasn’t entirely displeased when she suddenly flourished her four electro-probes and struck the mating posture, her seductive bare forelegs rustling chitonously.

I love this one.

[Kat]

@Boyo Jim

Seeing death off the starboard bow in the form of a rogue wave sweeping in, Marco the navigator began to calculate where his grave marker should be placed – a little to port and aft and about 5,000 feet down from his present position, which was… well, when he thought about navigational margins of error and continental drift and planetary rotation, and the orbit of the earth around the sun and the sun around the Milky Way, and galaxy’s trajectory outward from the original Big Bang, he finally appreciated the futility of his career choice – as a professional navigator and amateur cosmologist, Marco was the best equipped crewman on the ship to understand that he had no friggin’ clue exactly where he was: where he would be in another 30 seconds might just as well be called “up the creek” or “down the tubes” with as much accuracy as GPS coordinates

I was hoping for a Marianas Trench comment somewhere in this one.

Mine (I only sent in one):

It was late afternoon on the first Thursday of June, or it may have been the second Thursday, or was it the third…it was late afternoon on a Thursday in June, or else it was on a Friday in June, or July…it was late afternoon near the end of the week, sometime in the summer, when John met the pig, unless it was in the morning.

[susan]

It made me laugh out loud.

I love this one.

Thank you. More evidence of your keen discernment and obvious suitability as judges!

[Sampiro]

Another of mine:

From the moment a man is born he begins to die, and from the moment a man dies he begins to decompose, and yet a man does not begin to decompose from the moment he is born, unless that man was Erasmus Montrose of Shamrock, Texas, and it was this distinction far more than his ADHD or the unairconditioned Skylark he drove or the fact he lived with his amputee mother in a rusty travel trailer or his prison record or even his extreme narcissism and insistence on crushed ice in all liquids including hot chocolate and wine to which he attributed much of his problems with the opposite sex.

ETA: long version

[RiverRunner]

@Boyo Jim

Dan had a widespread reputation as a player, so much so that when he called his wife from New York and said he was riding on the Staten Island Ferry, her tired reply was, “I hope to God that means you’re on a boat.”

Like a demented Roomba repeatedly bumping against the same couch leg and plaintively sucking until the batteries ran down, Britney gyrated against the microphone stand.

Those are gold.
So’s Sampiro’s decomposition.

Makes me think I should enter something next year.
RR