Psst… wanna take a look at my slush pile?

The 2007 Bulwer-Lytton bad writing contest results are in; the winner says he has an edge because he’s an academician:

Gerald began–but was interrupted by a piercing whistle which cost him ten percent of his hearing permanently, as it did everyone else in a ten-mile radius of the eruption, not that it mattered much because for them “permanently” meant the next ten minutes or so until buried by searing lava or suffocated by choking ash–to pee.

Jim Gleeson

Also check out the genre submissions–this won the Children’s Fiction bad writing award:

Danny, the little Grizzly cub, frolicked in the tall grass on this sunny Spring morning, his mother keeping a watchful eye as she chewed on a piece of a hiker they had encountered the day before.

Dave McKenzie

From the desk of the Babu, please register one numbers laugh, hollow. This is GOOD stuff. I would publish the Grizzly story, especially if we could tie up with bookstores to offer an “Guess What’s Eating Gaurav” Grizzly free with each copy. On the other hand, after a mere six months in publishing, the slush pile creepeth up every dayeth. Once in a while you find an interesting project that comes from a complete stranger, but I’m beginning to understand why most publishers’ offices are surrounded by barbed wire and why the receptionist carries a stun gun and tranqs.

I can’t name names, but let’s just say that the poet of the NorthEast who has so far sent in six books of poetry, all of them weighing in at about 250 pages each and written in impenentrably blank verse, needs to stop calling herself the Bad of the North-East. It’s Bard… no, actually, let that stand.