'Carburetor' breasts work wins pathetic prose award

[angelophile]

SAN FRANCISCO, United States (AFP) - A software analyst who wrote of a woman's breasts inspiring visions of carburetors in a British sports car, won a contest for the lousiest opening line in a fiction novel.

Microsoft computer company employee Dan McKay won top honors for bad writing on Thursday at the 23rd annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest in the California town of San Jose with the following prose:

"As he stared at her ample bosom, he daydreamed of the dual Stromberg carburetors in his vintage Triumph Spitfire, highly functional yet pleasingly formed, perched prominently on top of the intake manifold, aching for experienced hands, the small knurled caps of the oil dampeners begging to be inspected and adjusted as described in chapter seven of the shop manual."

McKay was visiting China when San Jose State University contest officials dubbed him the year's worst writer, prompting judges to speculate he wanted "to escape notoriety for his dubious literary achievement."

The international literary contest was created in the memory of novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton, who died in 1873.

Bulwer-Lytton coined the phrases "the pen is mightier than the sword" and "the almighty dollar" as well as the perpetually maligned "It was a dark and stormy night".

Comments

[devin101.livejournal.com]

That's hilarious. Thanks for posting it! I have a new role model for my writing.