It Was A Dark And Stormy Night, aka... "Almost Just Right" Writing

Excerpts from books by Professor Scott Rice
Based Upon
The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest
Published by Penguin Books

 

 

NOT RECOMMENDED FOR Very YOUNG CHILDREN. 
PARENTS USE YOUR DISCRETION AND JUDGEMENT WHEN READING.

I intentionally left out all entries with any sexual references, settings or characters (even though funny). I did not use any that IMO are gross, too violent in description or disrespectful to any group, race or geographical location... If you want to read those, you'll have to buy the books. The following is a small sampling ( from 4 of the 5 books available) of what I feel is good humor for older children. Humor is subject to individual interpretation.

You might disagree with my sense of humor. If so, I apologize.

Click the Bolt to return to previous page!
Or for information on entering the contest.

The

The camel died quite suddenly on the second day, and Selena fretted sulkily and, buffing her already impeccable nails -- not for the first time since the journey began -- pondered snidely if this would dissolve into a vignette of minor inconveniences like all the other holidays spent with Basil.

Gail Cain, San Franciso, CA.

 

"The variety of quirks, ailments, and miscellaneous disfigurements that can strike the average supermarket shopping cart is truly amazing, "she said.

Gertrude Radfar, Ft. Lauderdale, FL

 

Bunny Berryman belied his name; he was a sour cop with a sour disposition and a face like two-week-old milk forgotten on the back porch step, and he knew it -- he also knew his mother had given him a better name than Bunny, but he'd been called Bunny for so long he'd forgotten exactly what it was.

J. Thompson, Rochester, NH

 

I was rookie in the game of love, dropping a fly at the wrong time, mishandling the high, long ones, striking out at the plate, you see, my gentle word traveler, I couldn't tell if fair was foul or foul was fair.

Thomas O'Toole, Knoxville, TN

 

Mary Jane turned her wedding band to the left and her hand to the right and her eyes straight upward, and then she said a roundabout prayer for her jumbled-up marriage, which had just gone down the drain.

H. Eugene Craig, Atlanta, GA

 

Once upon a time, a very very very long time ago (ever so long ago), a teeny tiny weeny furry bear (smaller than most) named Norbert Smythe lived with a great many other teeny tiny weeny fury bears in a cozy cave lined with cupboards filled with gooey treats fixed by Norbert's mummy (who loved him just as much as your mummy loves you and always tucked him into his teeny tiny weeny furry bed each night and dressed him each morning in little blue coveralls and a red and white stripped jersey and a cunning little sailor hat) in the middle, the absolute center, of a great big huge enormous forest and lots of bunnies and squirrels and mice and ducks and quite a few lambs and puppies and just a few kittens lived just around the corner so Norbert had ever so many exciting adventures and all-round fun times; this is the story of just one of those all-round fun times and if you like this story, you can ask mummy and addy to buy you all the rest of the forty-seven books in this series.

Gail Cain, San Franciso, CA

 

I mean, they were the kind of mellow times, but not exactly state-of-the-art times, if you follow.

Peter Schermerhorn, Rochester, NY

 

Let me tell you how luck, hard work, blind ambition and the love of a good woman brought Rock Sledge from obscurity to the job of chief salesperson in Peoria's third-largest shoe store.

Marion & Larry Gregg, Riverton, IL

 

The surface of the strange, forbidden planet was roughly textured and green, much like cottage cheese gets way after the date on the lid says it is all right to buy it.

Scott Davis Jones, Sausalito, CA

 

I watched in helpless horror as the monster clawed its way up the TV tower and wondered what could be in the mutated genes of these Alaska king crabs which caused them to snatch only Canadian aircraft from the sky.

Walter J. Murphy, Staten Island, NY

 

The most interesting feature about the Reverend Erin F.X. Nagabods, besides the swollen, bulbous nose planted pinkly between ruddy cheeks, above a tightly drawn mouth, and below dark, deep-set eyes, was his name.

Gregory J. Budzien, Wauwatosa, WI

 

It didn't matter to Gordon that he couldn't outrun the enraged mother grizzly; all he had to do was outdistance his chubby hiking partner, Fred.

David Willingham, Georgetown, TN

 

The professor lay on the floor in a widening pool of blood as Detective Johnson knelt by his side in time to hear the victim gasp, "It was.....it was.....Richard Keller, 1295 Maple Street, area code 691/555/6954, aaah..."

Richard W. O'Bryan, Perrysburg, OH

 

The hands of the little white porcelain clock, which had sat at her bedside since she was twelve years old and wildly in love with Baxton Heathley and which had been given to her by her aunt Martha who had since died of a mysterious ailment in Peru while reportedly seeking information on the whereabouts of the famed black diamond which had belonged to her mother and her mother before her and so on down the line until it had disappeared during a hailstorm in Kansas where she was attending a convention of Astrologers Annonymous, crept slowly.

Dorey Hollin-Lowe, Salinas, CA

 

With a curvaceous figure that Venus would have envied, a tanned unblemished oval face framed with lustrous thick brown hair, deep azure-blue eyes fringed with long black lashes, perfect teeth that vied for competition, and a small straight nose, Marilee had a beauty that defied description.

Alice A. Hall, Ft. Wayne, IN

 

The November snow was thin and slushy --- almost as if the angels in Heaven were brushing their teeth and dribbling toothpaste over the earth.

Mary Catherine Weir, Campbell, CA

 

As Roland slithered from a sly fox-trot into a torrid fandango, Melanie felt herself collapsing in his arms like meringue, or maybe like a slightly warmed raspberry sauce, or no, she decided --- definitely like a peche flambe, but of course lit up on all edges.

Sarah Remington, Dublin, CA

 

In the comfortable cottage on the hill (furnished mostly with Victorian oddments and endments) there lived a small, ordinary, everyday babbit with no magical powers at all except the kind that allowed him to slay slimy dragons, massacre regiments of goblins and save helpless villagers from power-mad sorcerers; mostly, though, he liked to stay at home and swill tea.

Gail Cain, San Franciso, CA

 

Once upon a time there was a little boy --- just like you!---named Jeff, andhe lived in a yellow house with a big yard, along with his mother and father and sister and brother and his bunny rabbit (until it got loose and Mr. Koberly's dog at it) and his goldfish (that his brother flushed down the toilet one day when he got mad at Jeff) and his puppy, Squitters, that ran in front of a car just a few weeks after Jeff's mom had to go to the hospital for an operation (only the operation didn't work, and Jeff's mommy went to Heaven); but before Jeff got {sick} and died, he and his puppy had this exciting adventure...

Cynthia Conyers, Aguanaga, CA

 

I was an extremely, extremely, extremely sensitive child.

Arnold Rosenfeld, Austin, TX

 

Once upon a Tuesday in some long past November with the sun dripping orangely on the Kremlin-shaped cumuli, my baby smooth footsies kerplopped convincingly upon the purple bathroom throw rug (it was more accurately mauve) as I listened almost unconsciously yet with great strain for the unmistakable "ching-chong-ching-chong" that meant (and could only mean) the onset of a new day at the beleaguered and oft-maligned Sioux City Taco Bell.

Ciscoe Louis, Jamaica Plain, MA

 

After six months of firing off anecdotes to Reader's Digest and not receiving even one acceptance, Gusha had used up all her own stories and those of her relatives and friends and had taken to hiding in restaurant booths to eavesdrop on strangers when the inevitable happened.

Mary Brown, Ventura, CA

 

Tom stopped picking the fuzz of Linda's angora sweater off his shirt, glanced up to see Linda clomp out of their hideously well-decorated bedroom carrying her ferns and his Don Ho albums, and felt a cold chill go up his spine as he realized that he did not know how to operate the microwave oven.

Lucian Janik, Jr. , Somerdale, NJ

 

Seth "Big Horn" McCoy, the grizzled old mountain man who long ago single-handedly tamed this once wild wilderness, making it a safe and decent place to live, was overwhelmed with shame and rejection as he peered out his cabin window at the hundreds of settlers his brave and selfless pioneering labors had brought to this territory, and who now stood a quarter mile away, shouting their demand that he either take a bath or move to the other side of the mountain.

Dennis McKiernan, Louisville, KY

 

The cowboys were hot and tired from the long drive, the past two weeks having been the hardest the men had ever known, but tomorrow looked to be better --- tomorrow they would try it with horses.

Amy M. Yamakawa, Honolulu, HI

 

It was about 11 P.M., Central Standard Time (our story taking place within the boundaries of that particular time zone) and due to a cold front off the Rockies meeting up with a warm front off the Great Lakes there was heavy percipitation in the form of rain, winds gusting up to forty miles per hour, and generally low visability, or in other words, it was a dark and stormy night.

Moses Montgomery, Winnipeg, Manitoba

 

It could have been an organically based disturbance of the brain --- perhaps a tumor or a metabolic deficiency -- but after a thorough neurological exam it was determined that Byron was simply a jerk.

Jeffrey C. Jahnke, McMinnville, OR

As Maria walked along the beach, the clouds grew angry, the sea raged, the wind howled, and the sand was just plain irritated.

Jeff Kruse, Van Nuys, CA

 

It was an unusual sunset, with the sea sucking the sun from the sky, sort of the way a dog might suck the yolk from an egg, but not exactly.

Anna Jean Mayhew, Chapel Hill, NC

 

Her long, dark hair blew in the breeze, like those red, plastic flags you see rippling in the wind at a used-car dealer's lot.

Linda Frederick, Union City, CA

 

Baltimore --- port city to the world---Fort McHenry --- "The Star-Spangeled Banner" --- the Inner Harbor --- Edgar Allen Poe---Babe Ruth---steamed crabs--- lacrosse at Homewood Field----marble steps ...but this has nothing to do with our story, Twilight in Boise.

Mike Marucci, Dundalk, MD

 

"Because so many readers write in when we do, we will never end a sentence with a preposition in this paper!" expostulated Senior Editor Percy Whyte, causing cub reporter Willy Watson to ruminate ponderingly, "Well, of course I would never use a preposition to finish a sentence up with, because it might be difficult to make sense out of, and after all, what would I want to use a preposition to finish a sentence that you cannot make any sense out of up with for?"

Robert Lodge, Seattle, WA

 

Our story commences with an account of the ghoulish death of the Duke of Breathwaite which, although of litle importance to the main events unfolding herein, establishes the atmosphere quite nicely.

Michael Haynes, Lantz, Novia Scotia

 

As the pickup truck swerved off th dirt road and rumbled end over end, real slow, just like in those movies on cable TV, Mike saw his life pasing before his eyes, also real slow, like those slow-motion special effects things in the movies, except that his life was not all that interesting, and he thought (although he couldn't be sure) that he saw some parts of it twice just to fill in the long, slow free-fall before the truck landed, on its wheels, inthe soft muck of the river bottom, leaving him to live what would become a far more interesting life.

Barbara Forsberg Buckley, Acton, MA

 

 

Pondering her predicament, Susie-Jo-Ellen could sense a solution forming in the back of her mind, but getting it to the front of her mind was like the long, slow, twisting, tortuous journey of water through the corroded, mineral-encrusted, lime-laced West Texas water pipes, and like the water, when it finally got there, it was no good.

Pam N. Shurley, San Angelo, TX

 

Maria was quite mortified when the crack Vatican investigation squad dispatched to her home ruled that the wondrous reflection off her new toaster was a coincidence rather than a true miracle, even though deep in her heart she too had wondered why in heaven's name the amazingly detailed image depicted our Savior wearing a Van Halen T-shirt and a crown of safety pins while playing air guitar in a vat of French poodles, rather than a more traditional scene.

Richard Carter, Hampton, VA

 

Just in the nick of time, Dr. Gillespie remembered the insistent lecturing of his old surgery professor: a surgeon must never say, "Ooops!"; a surgeon should always say, "There!"

Melanie Nickel, San Diego, CA

 

From the crest of the hill, John gazed down upon the little seaport town---fir trees poking through the morning fog; a heron gliding over the marshlands; the ornate Victorian courthouse like a gaudy brooch on the bosom of a dignified spinster; the sailboats bobbing at the dock as the wind slapped the halyards against their masts: spink , spink, spelank --- and thought, "What a place to build a McDonalds!"

Patricia Spaeth, Port Townsend, WA

 

Randi gazed thoughtfully up at the clear night sky, an inky canvas dotted with the tiny lights of distant suns, like lint on an infinite pair of dress slacks.

Cora Williams Weisenberg, Richton Park, IL

 

The mist clung to the mountains the same way a thirteen year-old girl clings to her boyfriend, although the mountain wasn't thinking about "getting lucky."

Richard Patching, Calgary, Alberta

 

Mike Hardware was the kind of private eye who didn't know the meanign of the word "fear," a man who could laugh in the face of danger and spit in the eye of death --- in short, a moron with suicidal tendencies.

Eddie Lawhorn, Huntsville, AL

 

Of course Charles was charged with murder one after attempting to revive his wife, Cynthia, by using the Heimlich maneuver after she had eaten vichyssoise soup.

Joseph J. Welch, St. Petersburg, FL

 

Sgt. Tom Katt wasn't 100 percent sure of anything, but he knew something wasn't quite right when the factory foreman told him that the nightshift guard had fallen into a vat of baby oil and softened to death.

Wayne D. Worthey, Washington D.C.

 

That scream, that howl, that final shriek just before Egbert died; Gwendolyn had never heard anything so horrible in all her life, but then she had never hard walnut shells in the garbage disposal.

Claire Ball, Kailua, HI

 

It was rather dark outside---not the kind of dark that's so dark that you can't see anything at all, but only the kind of dark where you can just barely see things after you've waited to allow your eyes to adjust to the dark, which is called dark-adaptation, which you can do best if you get enough Vitamin A.

Carol Deppe, Corvallis, OR

 

What joy to encounter the aspect of the sun coming up over the mountains, when the tallest thing I had ever seen was the Dairy Queen sign at Crupper's Corner that they put up last year right before the tornado blew it right through Brantley's Drug Store and they lost Aunt Josie's prescription.

Lucile Addington, Dallas, TX

 

 

The time tunnel was closing rapidly as Betsy Mae frantically dragged her toaster through the opening; morning in the twenty-third century would be a nightmare without Pop Tarts.

 

Carol Babst, San Jose, CA

 

Being turned into a cockroach was a shock of epic proportions, but at least Twinkies still tasted the same.

Jeremy Rice, San Jose, CA

 

As he finished off the last of his bourbon, Sidney realized that he was in for another evening of dancing rodents and flying elephants; God, how he hated working the night shift at Disney Studios.

James Dainis, Manhasset, NY


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