Sponsored by Mike Keenan, “The Retirement Coach.”
Like the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, the inspiration for this contest, this is the ideal contest for poor writing, as we seek the worst opening imaginable in one sentence to a novel about retirement. There’s no entrance fee and no limit to the amount of times you enter.
Make your opening worse than the examples that follow, and you have a decent chance of winning.
- A)Long opening example –
“Sheldon approached the menacing, pot-holed road to retirement like a perplexed motorist for the first time entering a roundabout in a foreign country, quickly slowing his previously-owned, rust-stained, fender-battered, oil-leaking Chevy, while wondering sideways if his financial planner was indeed truthful, worried his wife’s penchant for expensive travel might rapidly deplete his coveted nest-egg, suddenly consumed with the thought of economic safety measures as a large, interloping truck carrying cattle moved aggressively into his lane, blocking the view of his egress such that he was forced to spin around in complete circles several times like those difficult gravitational tests that apprentice astronauts are forced to endure before regaining equilibrium as well as the desire to press on despite incessant warnings by jealous colleagues that he might have pulled the retirement plug too soon like an anxious adolescent male experiencing his first sexual encounter with a well-practiced older woman, and pondering if he should have engaged in that regretful once-only affair with his secretary, who certainly proved that she was far more adept than a mere typist, able with her talented tiny digits to massage far more than mere words in that ill-advised tryst at Motel 69, too close to the highway, the incessant traffic noise almost as loud as his shocking groans of pleasure on that fateful night.”
- B)Shorter example
“Retirement loomed on the horizon, and quite anxious, Donald entertained mixed feelings about how it might suddenly penetrate his life like Dr. Carlson today, casually putting on a plastic glove and forcefully inserting his fingers far too deep in search of an enlarged prostate as Donald lay pensively on that very table where Carlson had performed a vasectomy on the other side of his body, seemingly so long ago when he was young and virile.”
Email entries to The Retirement Coach at mjk6648@gmail.com
Please include your name and mailing address.
The winner receives a suitable prize along with inclusion in a podcast, three dailies and one weekly that publish “The Retirement Coach,” as well as multiple Facebook pages along with the adulation of the writing community.
Tim Jordan grew up in Essex, England, surrounded by a loving family where science and fantasy were always part of their evenings and games. His passion for fantasy and fossils led to an early love of Tolkien and a childhood spent with his head stuck firmly in the clouds, inventing stories and fantastical worlds.
What’s your 2020 story?