With the opening line of "I am inconsolable, devastated, and grieved beyond measure." (Thank you for sharing this news, niyad. It makes me sad too.)

"Remember to get the weather in your damn book—weather is very important""

Never in my long lifetime have we been more in need of humor. I will miss Bulwer-Lytton.

It might have won but I was too proud to consider it:

As evening approached, the cool breezes retreated and pleasing warmth invaded every tower in the desert city of Thujwa.

One author who taught a workshop I attended said my prose was "overwritten." I assume he meant because nobody paid me for it, in which case it would've been "underwritten."

pooooh on that workshop author!

www. bulwer-lytton.com

Baaahahaha, and I thought I did run on sentences! I learned not to do that very often, some years back.
I screen grabbed the site for future laughs. TY

A veteran of WWI, after fifty years serving as the dooman to one of London's most exclusive gentlemen's clubs, the board offered him an attractive retirement package. He refused, sniffing "If I had known the position wasn't permanent, I would never have taken it."

I'm surprised no one can be found to take over the B-L contest. It is an institution, after all.

-- Mal

I, too, am surprised. But, perhaps as it was a family affair, they did not wish to outsource it?

From the book, then the movie, "Reflections in a Golden Eye," by Carson McCULLERS - far under rated gems. Went back to check many years later and it wasn't the *opening* line, but close. And I digress from the "dark and stormy" parody theme, since "fort in the South" is no parody.

************QUOTE*******

https://www.loa.org/news-and-views/1245-reflections-in-a-golden-eye-a-hothouse-tale-of-desire-and-simmering-violence/

.... “When I write about a thief,” she once said, “I become one; when I write about Captain Penderton, I become a homosexual man; when I write about a deaf mute, I become dumb during the time of the story. I become the characters I write about and I bless the Latin poet Terence who said, ‘Nothing human is alien to me.’” Twenty years earlier, in 1939, she had dreamed up the sad story of repressed Captain Weldon Penderton and written it in a rush; according to her biographer, Virginia Spencer Carr, she polished it off in a couple of months. She first called her short novel Army Post, and then, a little less drably, Reflections in a Golden Eye. “An army post in peacetime is a dull place,” it begins, but only a few sentences later, in the same calm tone, it tells us: “There is a fort in the South where a few years ago a murder was committed.” And then, “The participants of this tragedy were: two officers, a soldier, two women, a Filipino, and a horse.” These are the dramatis personae, the characters she’ll become. Even the horse. ....

********UNQUOTE********