Two Dark and Stormy Endurances

Pointed through my RSS reader to the latest winners of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for “worst opening sentences,” one of my first thoughts was the amused realisation it was still running after more than four decades. Not quite as long ago, but back in high school, I’d bought at last some of the little paperbacks collecting earlier entries.

Reading through those latest winners, I did get to wondering about the “Lyttle Lytton” contest organized by the multi-talented Adam Cadre. Despite my own weakness for assembling complicated sentences, I’d found rewards in Cadre’s more rigorous limit on words per sentence. A quick search revealed that contest was also running more than two decades after it had begun, and its own winners for this year were available.