Alex's Historical Fiction

Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest

Picked this up on Roman Army Talk, and it's too irresistable to leave out. It's from the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contents, 2005 Results:

Winner: Historical Fiction
Sphincter, the gladiator, girded his loins in preparation for today's games, glad to be part of the season opener since he hadn't been sure until yesterday that his contract would be renewed, given his slump during the Germans-versus-lions series but he knew that swatting Germans into the lion's pit was trickier than it looked and he told the officials that they should look at his other stats, not just Huns batted in.

Robert Peltzer
Baltimore, MD

Runner-Up
A column of five hundred Roman foot soldiers - a column held together by the plaster of courage -- advanced on a teeming sea of rebellious slaves -- slaves who had, ironically, built most of Rome's columns, although they actually used lime and not plaster to cement the structures, and though it is perhaps more historically precise to describe the soldiers' column as bound by the lime of courage, that doesn't really have the same adventurous ring to it.

Mark Hawthorne
Rohnert Park, CA

Dishonorable Mention
"Wet leaves stuck to the spinning wagon wheels like feathers to a freshly tarred heretic, reminding those who watched them of the endless movement of the leafy earth-or so they would have, if only those fifteenth-century onlookers had believed that the earth actually rotated, which they didn't, which is why it was heretical to say that it did-and which is the reason why the wagon held a freshly tarred heretic in the first place."

Alf Seegert
Salt Lake City, UT

Now them's are long sentences!

posted by Alex Bordessa @ Saturday, July 30, 2005