Someone upward in the thread also mentioned purple prose and odd specificity 
“As his small boat scudded before a brisk breeze under a sapphire sky dappled with cerulean clouds with indigo bases, through cobalt seas that deepened to navy nearer the boat and faded to azure at the horizon, Ian was at a loss as to why he felt blue.”
Do you know if you’re allowed to resubmit an entry next year? Or one very similar to the one you sent in?
That one cracked me up.
One of my favorites was from several years ago where the writer described the sunrise as someone in a gold costume riding the escalator to the linens & bedding floor at JCPenney. But I can’t find it now.
There’s no rule against it, and he gets so many thousands that it’s unlikely he’d notice.
I submitted a sequel opening sentence to the one that won for me:
"Gerald pondered his astonishing survival – what had heretofore seemed embarassing weaknesses now appeared divinely ordained – a weak bladder and extreme personal modesty having driven him deep into an underground cave to relieve himself moments before a tremendous volcanic eruption spewed God’s wrath over his village: Gerald now imagined his next bodily secretions were sacred offerings,and he pledged, “My leak is for the Lord, my mucous belongs to mother, and my fart belongs to daddy.”
I think he has an unwritten rule about no repeat winners, because dammit, some of mine have been better than the later winners!
Are they still publishing books of winners every year? Way back when, my parents acquired a few collections in print, and being a kid who read a lot, I read through them over and over again. I still remember fondly one of the early winners, which ended with the immortal quote, “Flick that Bic, toast that chick, and you’ll feel my steel through your last meal.”
Epic.
Here are a few other entries I’ve sent in over the last few years. None have got as far as the finals.
Deedee doesn’t do diddley during daylight; during dusk, Deedee duly, dully doodles deer dropping drawings.
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."
(another version of the Gerald sequel)
**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 urinating 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. **
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.
**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. **
**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. **
**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. **
They publish the book versions every five years or so. The last one was in 2007, just a few months too soon to include my entry, 
Yours that won is still my favorite, Boyo.
This is one of my favorites, and I’m not even 100% sure I ever sent it in, so WTF, I’m going to send it again…
His abs didn’t ‘ripple’ nor was he buff; yet his abdomen was solid and carven as a New England chest of drawers, and should New Englanders build abdomens of drawers – which they should because after all drawers are meant to be worn over abdomens and not chests – his would be one of them, but they don’t and it isn’t; and of his buffness, the less said the better.
:D:D:D
Thank you!!
Good to know. I’ll watch for the next one!
With a slight change, this almost seems familiar
I seem driven to write these things.
Postmodernist detective Jack Derriere stared glumly at the tainted DNA report produced by a hegemonic scientific elite with questionable yet unquestioned assumptions about human characteristics; the seemingly objective though hopelessly incomplete surveillance footage, which while apparently showing the “murderer” shooting the “victim” more than 20 times could not show the influences that might have made it a perfectly rational act; and the ridiculously biased witness testimony which said more about the witnesses than it did about the murder, if there was indeed one; and just before Jack blew his own head off, he thought to himself, “That philosophy class at Open University sure cleared things up for me”.
That’s why I like this year’s winner. It’s subtle.
I saw what you did there. 
10,000th post just short of my 10 year anniversary!
Love this!
Where are the rules for submitting an entry? I’d like to give it a try as well.
Not really, it’s part of the whole point of the concept. Here’s the sentence which inspired the contest…
[QUOTE=Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton]
It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.
[/QUOTE]
There’s at least three sentences in there. One of which is a total non sequitur in its context.
Bulwer-Lytton was actually not a terrible writer - I’m currently reading The Coming Race, and it’s flowing quite nicely. (He’s also the one who coined the phrase ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’.) Yet, he still turned out that atrocity.
Poorly labeled, but at the bottom of this page.