AW July Blog Chain–“It Was A Dark And Stormy Night…”

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twas a dark and stormy night

Image by darkmatter via Flickr

This month’s prompt: the Mini Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest

The Mini Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest means trying to write the worst possible first line of a book or story in the spirit of Edward “It was a dark and stormy night…” Bulwer-Lytton. “Worst” in this case is subjective, but florid and ridiculous purple prose is probably closest to the spirit of the thing. Here is a page of examples if you need ’em.

Each post must consist of a single sentence of any length but less than 50-60 words.  (Mine’s 61 words…sorry…but all the words are easy to read)

I was preceded in the chain by Orion_mk3 and will be followed by Dolores Haze.  A complete list of participants follows at the end.  I’ve renamed myself after my maternal grandmother, first pet name dash first street name (though I really had no idea, but looked up the Air Force base on a map and picked a road from the military housing area).

Here’s my attempt:

Summer oozed to a putrid halt when, speakerphone on, Krista punched 8 and 6, for her number of left and right ear piercings, 7, for infections contracted, 5, for doctor visits, 3, for courses of antibiotics prescribed, 0, for insurance coverage, and 1, which was exactly the number of rings heard before a recording announced Piercings by Jenny had been disconnected.

~ Lady Doris Dice-Cypress

orion_mk3 – http://nonexistentbooks.wordpress.com (link to this month’s post)
AuburnAssassin – YOU ARE HERE
dolores haze – http://dianedooley.wordpress.com/ (link to this month’s post)
Horseflye – http://thecozylittleplot.blogspot.com/ (link to this month’s post)
Proach – http://www.deannaproach.com/ (link to this month’s post)
xcomplex – http://arielemerald.blogspot.com/ (link to this month’s post)
BigWords – http://bigwords88.wordpress.com/ (link to this month’s post)
jkellerford – http://jennykellerford.wordpress.com/ (link to this month’s post)
Ralph Pines – http://ralfast.wordpress.com/ (link to this month’s post)
Euclid – http://euclid-thoughts.blogspot.com/ (link to this month’s post)
Diana Rajchel – http://dianarajchel.com (link to this month’s post)
pezie – http://www.erinbrambilla.wordpress.com/ (link to this month’s post)
Guardian – http://daewrites.blogspot.com/ (link to this month’s post)
egoodlett – http://wordlarceny.blogspot.com/ (link to this month’s post)
Alpha Echo – http://writersramblings81.blogspot.com/ (link to this month’s post)

31 thoughts on “AW July Blog Chain–“It Was A Dark And Stormy Night…””

  1. I love the way you tackled a more modern subject in such a florid way, Lady Doris. And your Bulwer-Lytton name is wonderfully goofy!

  3. Oh, ugh, poor girl. This opening is indeed oozing pus, but it’s also a clever and beautifully constructed sentence. Your talent is shining through, Claire!

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  6. I can totally picture Summer as a confident goth girl with a wicked sense of humour. Aside from the length of the sentence, how is this bad, exactly?

    I liked it! Love the dark humour!

    • Oh my! I’m semi-laughing here because I intended Summer to simply be a reference to the season but it reads correctly as a woman’s name too, which is how you saw it. Does that give me extra credit points for badness? Please? (Can’t believe I even want to be bad. LOL)

  7. Pssh, I thought the opening was supposed to be awful! 😛 I liked this actually. I mean, okay, a little rambly, but I wanted to know wtf was up with this main character and what was going on 🙂

  9. I think this is too well written to be called awful, although it’s still to wordy for me to become attached to the character. Well done.

  10. I agree with Proach: the idea here is quite nice–put some shackles on that Imagination next time :O) Wonderfully [read:horribly] wordy, though. Nice work!

    • You guys are killing me with too much kindness! LOL I wanna be bad! (she whines) Truly I’m both laughing and shaking my head here at the comments, which make me wonder if I failed or if I succeeded. I think I’ll choose to believe I succeeded. It’s nice and safe in this little world o’mine. Thank you!

  11. Ha! I love it. Very clever. And I love how you showed you could still be purple and rambly while being contemporary too. Good job doing a bad job and all that :).

    Did you change your blog layout or am I imagining things? I like the header.

    • Thanks, Erin.  🙂

      I did change my blog format.  Everytime WordPress releases a new template, I have to give it a try, sometimes, I adopt the new one.  The header is a recycled one from many months ago when I was all about steampunk.  The blog back then was dark toned though and people weren’t too fond of light on dark for the text.

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    • Florid and rambling…I’ve probably done it (more rambling than florid, just like this comment) far too often with every intent of it being ‘good’ writing.  LOL  Thanks for the read and comment. 🙂

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