It's all been downhill since "I raped your sister," cruelly he sneered, "and now she is no problem," and my friends that is the day my heart tore a sunder., the queen of Lyttle Lytton sentences. (The king is PEWPEW -- Lasers! -- PEWPEWPEW!.) I also remain fond of my friend Skot's I know who the murderer is, Kevin blogged. and rfts' entry from that year.
But your entry did get mentioned before any of the winners.
I've never seen that site before (unless I saw it here before but have since forgotten about it, which vaguely seems like it might be right), so I skipped right over all the winning entries (which I still haven't read) and jumped straight to the rules to get the basic gist of what this contest is about--on the theory that the entries wouldn't make much sense without understanding the goal/intent--and I came away with a very unfavorable impression. Why do the rules set out a bunch of different criteria about how words will be counted for purposes of the contest (contractions count as one word; one free hyphen per word; punctuation doesn't count as a word so long as it's being used as punctuation and not as a lexical element, etc.), when as far as I can see there is no binding constraint anywhere in the rules about the number of words you can use? The only rule regarding length is: "the maximum length of all your entries combined is 200 characters". Is this some sort of bad joke?
3: actually, I realized that he might have thought my entry was too close to that sort of Actual Lyttonish syntax. BUT I DON'T CARE. My assessment: its pleasures were just too subtle for him to discern.
4: the character count thing is new. In previous years it was word-based; he must just not have been very thorough in updating the rules.
You submitted
As those of you who have followed this contest over the past decade-plus are well aware, there have been a number of tweaks to the rules over the years.
?
4: There's a link on the rules page that tells you that there's a 25 word limit.
8: that's on the "about" page, not the "rules" page, and that rule was only applicable in previous years!!
My submission: "They say that pride, like the summer, goeth before a fall, yet I little suspected, that summer after my high school graduation, how quickly autumn would come."
And I think you have to admit that beginning would definitely signal an absolutely dreadful novel.
6: I actually had the same thoughts as urple when I first read it, but merely muttered about it to myself using my quiet voice. Apparently unlike urple, I have fully internalized that we live in a fallen world.
In the 2010 winners page, he mentions the new word count limit as set at 33.
Most of them are pretty funny, but there clearly seems to be a bias in favor of the crass and contemporary, perhaps so as to distinguish it from the other contest.
And I think you have to admit that beginning would definitely signal an absolutely dreadful novel.
Indeed. That is a good entry.
Jeziriel had wandered long enough to shed the pain in his wing stumps before he saw the girl whose Carousel, he knew, would send him soaring aloft with his burning sword once more.
And to think that they even included a quote from Achewood instead of yours. That's gotta hurt.
Do we get to see neb's entry, or what?
I'd prefer to see neither neb's entry nor his submission.
rfts' entry from that year
Which was . . . ?
After you tell me to RTFA, please tell me the answer so I don't have to RTFA.
You don't want to have to RTFA to get your rfts?
Were the entry identified, so too would be rtfs, which may not be something she wishes to take place.
Oh, hey, neb's entry in 10 is actually funny.
Oh, Den/nis Over/bye, whatever would we do without you?