By Margaret Lucke

As April 15 rolls around, I’m saddened to report of the demise of one of that date’s most cherished annual events.

No, I’m not talking about the deadline for filing your federal income taxes. You still have to do that, and if you haven’t yet started dealing with all of those numbers and all of that paperwork, I recommend you stop reading this blog right now and get busy with that task.

What I’m referring to is the late, great Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. It was announced not long ago that 2024 would be this beloved competition’s final year.

While entries were accepted any time, the official deadline was each year April 15 –which, as the contest’s organizer, Professor Scott Rice, noted, is “a date that Americans associate with painful submissions and making up bad stories.”

The English Department of San Jose State University began sponsoring this annual wordfest in 1982. Writers were urged to come up with the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels.

It’s a challenge for any writer to come up with an opening line that will grab our readers and pull them into reading the rest of the book. With the Bulwer-Lytton winners, there was no rest of the book.  They were often complete single-sentence stories. Anything more would have been superfluous.

The contest was named for Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, a minor (perhaps deservedly so) but prolific British novelist of the Victorian era. His best-known title is probably The Last Days of Pompeii, and he originated the saying “The pen is mightier than the sword.” But he is most famous today for penning the immortal opening line: “It was a dark and stormy night … ” Thus begins the novel Paul Clifford, the story of an English gentleman man who moonlights as a criminal.

The complete sentence reads:

“It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents–except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.”

Snoopy, famed beagle from the Peanuts comic strip, appropriated the first seven words for the title and first sentence of his own novel. Snoopy is not one to waste words. His entire novel is only 214 words, not all that much longer than Bulwer-Lytton’s single sentence. A born mystery writer, he jumps straight into a suspenseful plot with his second sentence: “Suddenly a shot rang out.” 

Back to the Bulwer-Lytton contest: In its first year it attracted three submissions. In its second year, thanks to a little publicity, the number grew to 10,000. Writers were invited to submit as many abysmal first sentences as they like. One year a hopeful author sent in more than 3,000. If he had strung them together he would have had an entire book, which surely would have qualified as a the worst of all possible novels.

I submitted my own masterpiece of a first line one year. Sadly it didn’t win, possibly because it exceeded the recommended length of not more than 50 of 60 words. I’m fond of it anyway, and I can’t resist including here:

“Until the night he set her house afire, burning down the only home she’d ever known, incinerating the manuscript of her nearly completed novel, turning her cherished photos of Daddy to ash, though thank goodness the cats escaped … until the hour when sparks soared across the heavens like shooting stars and the smoke from the conflagration carried away all her hopes and dreams … until the moment when a firefighter squelched her screams and drenched her nightgown with a well-aimed hose … until that very instant Isabelle believed her love affair with Rolf would last forever.”

Hmm, maybe I should think about writing the rest of that book.

If you’re interested in reading the sentences that the judges, in their wisdom, preferred to mine, you can find an archive of the winners and dishonorable mentions here: https://www.bulwer-lytton.com/winners

by Janis Patterson

As most of you know, I just returned from several weeks in Egypt and Jordan. Fascinating… and exhausting, but I’m covering that in the Trip Diary that will be on my website. What I’m going to talk about now is souvenirs. Souvenirs are something to remind you of what you did/saw… or to take home to friends and family so they will know where you went and what you did.

The Husband and I quit the souvenir train a long time ago – mostly. He always buys a few postcards and I usually pick up something small, like a refrigerator magnet. (Though I did buy a spectacular gold-embroidered dress in Cairo – have no idea where I will wear it in the foreseeable future, but I do know I couldn’t have left without out it.)

Back to souvenirs. Whether for us or for others ‘small’ is the operative word. We always try to travel light, especially on a ‘rough’ trip like this one, so space is limited. Plus, one must consider the egregious baggage charges the airlines are extorting from us. No space, no extra charges = small. Very small.

But… as pleasant as little trinkets can be, they are not necessary to life. All they really do is stimulate our memories and feelings of pleasant or adventuresome times, and we can call forth those memories on our own, because what is really important is the memory – not the trinket purchased there, though the trinkets are nice to have.

To drag this post to the business of writing, in a not-too-unusual way a well-crafted story is a souvenir – a memory that you might have not had yet, but once the story is read it stays with you forever. How many of us have favorite scenes, favorite stories, that always evoke a reaction within us? Isn’t that like how a souvenir can in the blink of a memory bring back sights and sounds and actions previously experienced? Just because it is not brightly colored or even physical doesn’t mean that it isn’t a sort of souvenir… an encapsulated memory.

That means I can forget small. I live in a house with four libraries, each simply bulging with books, most of which I have read. I can pick up almost any one of them and suddenly there is a memory, a feeling inspired by something in that book. A souvenir of a life – an event – a something that I might or might not have experienced in the flesh, but which still arouses not only a memory but an emotion in me… just like when I pick up the embroidered shawl my husband bought for me in a small shop in Petra, or the tiny terra cotta Mayan figure I found in Mexico, or… I could go on and on. Like you and probably everyone else on the planet I have more souvenirs and more memories than I can handle.

So… when you are writing your books, remember that you are not only creating a story, you are creating a souvenir of a life the reader never lived.

I’d been waiting all year for the 2025 Left Coast Crime Conference to happen. I signed up for it sometime in the summer of 2024. My husband, Norm, and I made reservations on the Amtrak going from Emeryville, California, to Denver, Colorado. We were going to join friend and fellow writer, Janet Dawson, on the 36-hour train ride across the Rockies, play cards and scrabble, eat wonderful meals, and arrive in Denver in time to check in for the conference on Wednesday evening. I had registered and paid for the conference and bought tickets to the Awards Dinner for Norm and me. I was on a fun panel. We had airline tickets to fly home Sunday evening at the end of the conference. There was even an afternoon tea at the famous Brown’s Hotel on the agenda. All was right with the world, and the trip was planned to the last detail. But pass the cheese, please. The best-laid plans of mice and men.

6 days before we were to leave, I started coughing. I wasn’t too worried. I had nearly a week to shake this, right? Besides, I had all the vaccinations you can have. Nothing could happen, right? Wrong. Each day the coughing, sneezing, wheezing, and congestion got worse. On the 4^th day of this scourge, I saw my doctor and got tested. No Covid, RSV, or flu. Just one of your common, every day, unnamed viruses that knocks your socks off for at least 10 to 14 days. Stay home, drink plenty of liquids, take whatever over-the-counter meds make you feel better, and ride it out. That’ll be $25, please. Thank you, Doctor. I could have told you that and saved myself 25 bucks and a trip to Kaiser. I have since named the unnamed virus. After all, they name hurricanes, and this was my very own personal hurricane. I call it Fred.

But I digress. So, home I went, feeling enormously sorry for myself. I crawled back into bed, Norm brought me chamomile tea, the cats cuddled, and I resigned myself. We were scheduled to leave for Denver in three days, and I could barely lift my head from the pillow. There was no way I could make this trip. Even Norm, Mister-You-Can-Do-It, shook his head in sympathy. Time to put on my Big Girl Panties, so to speak, and let friends, associates, and fellow writers know I wasn’t coming to LCC this year. My life was over. Well, not really. But when one feels like a bucket of horse manure and locked out of one of the most wonderful and fun times of the year, one is allowed to go there. So, there I went.

It was short-lived. Soon, I got texts and pictures from the train taken by our wonderful Janet, who was disappointed we couldn’t join her but was making the best of it. In those brief moments, I felt a part of the trip, enjoying the shared moments. Janet continued to send me highlights of the trip, conference, and even the high tea at Brown’s. Then a few other pals wrote emails or sent me texts, some with pictures. Even the panel moderator, Chris Dreith, decided not to replace me with another writer but wanted me to answer the same questions she would have asked had I been there. Chris made a sock puppet in my image. I gotta tell you, the resemblance is uncanny. See right. Using her ventriloquist skills, Chris used the sock to voice my answers. Then she gave the puppet sock and my latest book to a contest “winner,” Grace Koshida, who happens to be the Fan of Honor at the conference. Because Grace is a sweetheart, she alerted me on Facebook about this and included more wonderful pictures.

I may not have been at the conference, but so many people went out of their way to include me and make sure I knew I was missed, like Baird Nuckolls pictured left, that I feel warm all over when I think about it. I am well now, but I am keeping the emails, texts, and pictures sent by my friends and associates from LCC 2025 for the future. If I ever feel sorry for myself, that nobody cares, and I’d better eat some worms, before I get out the frying pan I’m going to remember this incident. I’m going to be thankful I live in a world with friends who are mystery writers and readers because, surely, they are the most thoughtful and kindest people on the planet.