"I thought mine was better!"

Haven't we all said that, about everything from jokes sent to Readers' Digest (I'm now convinced they publish only jokes sent in by their staff's relatives -- do you know anyone who ever sold them anything???) to jingles we submitted to radio or TV stations for ads that never were. Our superior efforts are repeatedly ignored in favor of far less deserving material. Grmph! Well, those gems deserve publication somewhere, gul-durn-it. So I'm puttin' 'em here. Below are several of my most recent (and of course, brilliant) (cough-cough) contest entries that didn't win. Even though they were better than what won. So there. :-b
 

Marilyn's 100-Word Contest

Marilyn vos Savant's Parade Magazine column challenged readers to write a 100-word paragraph that made sense without repeating any words. Below is my losing entry. As is not uncommon in my experience, the piece Marilyn selected as the winner (out of 5000+ submitted) and published in her column struck me as... well... dull, despite adhering to all the rules of the contest. Mine, besides being exactly 100 words long and not repeating any words, was also a complete "flash" story in and of itself, one which asked the terribly profound question, "What if Edgar Allan Poe were living today in the computer age, and tried to enter this contest?"

Edgar contemplated writing one hundred words without repeating any. Blue phosphor stared back at him, white cursor blinking rapidly, delivering its challenge. Ten fingers flexed, poised themselves, then finally attacked waiting keys with vigor. Forty! Fifty! Oh, damn. Used "raven" twice. Select all, delete, start again. Racked up sixty-four that time before crashing full tilt into those wretched, replicating bells! Curses. Erase, try something else. What, though? Clock chiming midnight, he pondered, already feeling weak and weary. Palms sweated. Brain strained. Nothing occurred. "Impossible!" the writer huffed. His laptop snapped shut upon a vow to attempt such silly contests nevermore!
 

Bulwer-Lytton Strikes Again

Every year, Professor Scott Rice of San Jose State University perpetrates the infamous Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for the worst opening line of the worst novel never written, and is promptly inundated with thousands upon thousands of truly awful first sentences. The winner and several runners-up wind up published on their website and/or in paperback collections. Here again, my genius, even for bad writing, has been cruelly overlooked. (!) Come on, now. Tell me these aren't the three worst first lines to the three worst novels you'll never read that you've ever seen in your life!
 

Veni, Vidi...

Wet, vile and malodorous did that bane of all banes ooze forth from some deep, unknowable stygian depth, that puissant miasma, that hideous gut-gripping agony, that foul, stenchful and execrable galloping flux that had brought the mightiest of armies to its knees and sorely provoked the great and venerable Caesar to achingly proclaim, "Veni, vidi, feci!"
 

Eezee

"Well, geez, you know, that is like,  just sooooooo lame!" lamented Ashley Ambergris-Luddington-Smyth (better known to her multitudinous male suitors as "Eezeekins," though she had never fathomed why), "and just soooooo not-me even, and like, what's with this thing where these guys are all, ‘Hey, dudes, you know, the bigger the tits, the smaller the wits!' when they, like, know I've got nothing to do with, like, dopey little birds or stupid Victorian card games!"
 

Maawu

Safely and lovingly cuddled with her beneath the forest thicket's vaulted leafy canopy, Maawu Pawuhu, strongest and mightiest warrior of the Hufuawubee Clan, adoringly stroked with his battle-thickened fingers her soft, silken, golden tresses, breathed with his war-wearied, panting breath sweet murmurings into her teasing, trembling ears, inhaled the dusky, musky, heady scent of her sweat-dewed limbs, and caressed with his own equally-eager one her rough, probing, seductively wet tongue, and it was then that he knew beyond any doubt that no matter what the jealous, unsympathetic clan may say and no matter what the Elders Council may rule, he could simply never bear to be parted from Boapoo, his beloved woolly musk ox, ever again.
 

All right, all right, so I've tortured you enough. Go back and read some fanfic, now...
 
 

Back to Jean's Fan Fiction Archive