Let's face it -- clinical depression is nothing to laugh at.


It's pervasive.  It's all consuming.  And these days, frankly, it's kicking my ass.


But if there's anything other than the annual library book sale to proffer a little bit of sunshine in my life, it's this:  the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.

The 2008 results are in! And the winner is ...........

The winner of 2008 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is Garrison Spik (pronounced "speak"), a 41-year-old communications director and writer from Washington, D.C. Hailing from Moon Township, Pennsylvania, he has worked in Tokyo, Bucharest, and Nitro, West Virginia, and cites DEVO, Nathaniel Hawthorne, B horror films, and historiography as major life influences.

Garrison Spik is the 26th grand prize winner of the contest that began at San Jose State University in 1982.


An international literary parody contest, the competition honors the memory (if not the reputation) of Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873). The goal of the contest is childishly simple: entrants are challenged to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels. Although best known for "The Last Days of Pompeii" (1834), which has been made into a movie three times, originating the expression "the pen is mightier than the sword," and phrases like "the great unwashed" and "the almighty dollar," Bulwer-Lytton opened his novel Paul Clifford (1830) with the immortal words that the "Peanuts" beagle Snoopy plagiarized for years, "It was a dark and stormy night."


Most entries are submitted electronically through the Contest's Web site: http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/. A new collection of previous winners was published in August 2007 by The Friday Project. It is available through Amazon.com.uk.




Runner-Up


Nope, don't even THINK of navigating away.  How can you before you've read the winning entries in the "Adventure," "Children's Literature," "Purple Prose," "Detective" and more categories!


Read on ... and enjoy!