From the Salmon

So here I was, all flummoxed in my attempts to start writing again, largely because it used to be something I was good at, and these days it seems to be not so much.

But now I come to discover that it isn’t necessarily good writing that y’all are hoping for — at least not Jim. He’s okay with the bad writing, too. Or at least my writing about the bad writing, which may have ended up being good. Admittedly, it’s all still a but murky, except for the part where Jim likes writing.

You’d think this revelation would’ve made things a lot easier for me, but your thinking that would be a clear indication that you’ve never actually tried to write badly. It’s an art form all its own, requiring fearlessness, a ruthless creativity, and an almost fanatical devotion to masochistically meandering metaphor.

On the off chance that my point needed bolstering, it just so happens that the 2006 winners of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest were unleashed on the world last week.

The highest honor went to fellow Californian Jim Guigli, who penned this doozy:

Detective Bart Lasiter was in his office studying the light from his one small window falling on his super burrito when the door swung open to reveal a woman whose body said you’ve had your last burrito for a while, whose face said angels did exist, and whose eyes said she could make you dig your own grave and lick the shovel clean.

See what I mean?

There’s plenty more where that came from, but this from Debra Allen in Wichita Falls, Texas, was one my particular favorites:

Lisa moved like a cat, not the kind of cat that moves with a slinky grace but more like the kind that always falls off the book shelf when he’s washing himself and then gets all mad at you like it’s your fault (which it wasn’t although it probably was kind of mean to laugh at him like that), although on the bright side, she hardly ever attacked Ricky’s toes in his sleep.

Maybe you have to be a cat owner to appreciate it.

The whole list is delightfully painful to slog through, but Dothan, Alabama’s Dennis Barry’s offering had a sucker punch at the end that would have made me snort my milk if I had been drinking milk instead of the porter I had unwisely opened before my Lytton slogging, as there’s nothing worse than finding yourself on the wrong end of a porter snorter:

Despite the vast differences in their ages, ethnicity, and religious upbringing, the sexual chemistry between Roberto and Heather was the most amazing he had ever experienced; and for the entirety of the Labor Day weekend they had sex like monkeys on espresso, not those monkeys in the zoo that fling their feces at you, but more like the monkeys in the wild that have those giant red butts, and access to an espresso machine.

By now, I’m sure you’re beginning to look back at the months when I was quiet with a newfound fondness. And if I had any discretion whatsoever, I’d know that now would be the time to wrap things up cleverly and quit while I’m still within spitting distance of being ahead. But I don’t. And that’s a shame for you. Well, unless you’re T. Edward Lavoie of Essex Junction, Vermont, who finishes us off with this neat trick:

The steam rose off his sweaty red flannel shirt like cotton candy on a cardboard cone, if cotton candy were transparent in a misty sort of way and didn’t actually stick to its cone, but instead rose upwards something like steam rising off a sweaty flannel shirt in the twilight of an early winter Vermont afternoon.

So I might be back. I’ll let you decide if that’s a good thing.