Blog RSS FeedAnd the winner is… (dubious honors revealed!)
(Pre-script: come on over to the Debutante Ball today and tell us what decorates your walls!)
New business:
Congratulations to the contest winner, #19, Tashiana Hudson! Tashiana will get a signed copy of
Thanks for all the entries, everyone. I must say, your worst last lines alternately cracked me up and left me totally shuddering (often both).
First of all, the “It was just a dream” entries made me wonder if there has ever been a good use of that phrase to end a story. That seems like a challenge for somebody. Maybe we’ll have a flash fiction contest or something!
But Jason really took it to another level, one that hurt his brain to write and all of our brains to read:
“But, alas, it was merely a vividly experienced dream, where the allusion that was surprisingly witnessed seemed so incredibly real to him, so happily not true, that, irregardless of what may have secretly transpired between Olivia and the creepily mysterious Mr. Alfonso, the affect of the dream was so obviously fake, that it seemed so surprisingly real, but luckily, was not real at all. Or was it??”
Jo?lle Anthony’s last line almost doesn’t qualify, because it sounds suspiciously to me like a very GOOD last line:
“And then he ate the very last piece of chocolate in the entire world without even giving me a bite.”
TheCompulsiveReader’s is another suspiciously good bad line:
“And so after slaying the magnificently evil dragon, the prince and his princess lived happily ever after (except for that one time two months later when the dragon?s cousin?s nephew came to seek revenge, thus distracting the prince so that evil gnomes could kidnap the princess, and for a whole year everything was in turmoil and there was that weird thing that happened with this one fairy, but other than that, it was pretty much happily ever after).”
Laina’s cracked me up:
“They all died, the end.”
And I think Laura deserves a shout-out because the line leading up to her last line, which was not creative writing but apparnetly the sad truth, sounds like a great worst last line to em:
“First of all I?m not even sure what the date is or even what time it is. My computer is stuck in the twilight zone of travel and someday I?ll remember that jet lag and alcohol don?t mix.”
And lastly, my author buddy Robin Brande (whose new book, Fat Cat sounds really good and comes out this fall), entered the contest without reading the deadline and therefore is out of the running for the tote bag and eye pillow but DEFINITELY deserves a mention for her awesomely dreadful writing skillz (it takes a good writer to write this badly, folks):
“He slapped me then shouted, ?Slap yourself!? which I did because this wasn?t the first nor the last time I?d been other-directed self-slapped and I was beyond my amateur status at it by now even though everything else in my life has stopped short of perfection or even near-adequacy, so I heard myself slap, slap, SLAP! and felt pale if not red-faced satisfaction at the love we were going to continue to explore, each in our way, each alone as we forged a life together, strangers stranger than perhaps we were even willing to admit to ourselves or the media, in love though we were, completely and totally forevermore, just us and the dogs and the simple one-legged cat.
The End. Forevermore.
Or is it???”
And thank you all for sharing the endings that spoke to you! Some of those were books I’ve read, and some I hadn’t heard of. I’ll be sure to check them out!
I don’t know if I shared an ending that stayed with me, so I thought I’d do that now. It’s from one of my favorite books, “Fair and Tender Ladies,” which is by a woman named Lee Smith and is just a fantastic piece of writing. The heroine/narrator, Ivy Fox, is reflecting back over her life, starting with her childhood in a poor Appalachian mining community.
“The hawks fly round and round, the sky is so blue. I think I can hear the old bell ringing like I rang it to call them home oh I was young then, and I walked in my body like a queen.”
4 comments July 14th, 2009
Why, you ask? BECAUSE! It’s time to reveal the winners of the contests from last week… 
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