It was another exceptional contest. Read the best entries and find out who won.
$100.00 Best First Sentence Contest — Halloween Edition
Journal Pulp is offering a $100.00 cash prize for the following:
Best first sentence for a novel about a clever but silent twelve-year-old girl who’s an only child and who one dark night traveling with her mother and father falls asleep in the backseat of the car — and wakes to find that same car on the side of the road, not wrecked but parked and with all the doors open, her mother and father both dead on the pavement, their throats cut wide open, blood everywhere, a faint trail of footprints in the dust.
Rules and guidelines:
No outrageous run-ons. You can submit anonymously or under your real name, it doesn’t matter.
No minimum length requirement.
Submit as many separate entries as you’d like.
Leave your sentence in the comments section here.
The winner will be selected by the Journal Pulp.
The contest will be open for two weeks from today: October 17th, 2014, through October 31st, 2014, at midnight on Halloween.
If your sentence doesn’t appear in the comments after you’ve submitted, it’s almost certainly because of my (overly) aggressive SPAM filter. Please note that I check the SPAM folder carefully and regularly, and that your sentence, if it’s not SPAM, will be approved.
Best First Sentence Winner
It was another difficult decision over which I heartached for one week.
Here, in no particular order, were the finalists:
She sat down exhausted.
— Shannon Murray
After a lifetime of incubation, she now carried the fatal disease.
— Scott
She stepped into darkness, and the sickening crunch of dried bones made her cringe.
— Bethany
But the winner was Dave Zoby, whose entry reads thus:
Macon, Ga–The Ark of the Covenant was a flimsy, earth-worm colored thrill ride that lifted a rattling chain of cars above the lid of fall foliage, flinty hills to the west, glimpse of river like a wet snake; Laura sat beside her husband, Reverend Doug Brown, as the cars trundled upward link by link, and said to herself that when this was over she was leaving him and her idiot children once and for all, his forthcoming pleas and death threats be damned.
Congratulations, Dave.
And my thanks to you all.
One Hundred Dollars for the Best First Sentence
Journal Pulp is offering a $100.00 cash prize for the following:
Best first sentence for a novel about a monomaniacal archeologist who discovers for certain the actual resting place of the Ark of the Covenant, and who resolves that, despite its being so heavily guarded, she will open the golden lid of the Ark — or die trying.
Rules and guidelines:
No outrageous run-ons. You can submit anonymously or under your real name, it doesn’t matter.
No minimum length requirement.
Submit as many separate entries as you’d like.
Leave your sentence(s) here.
The winner will be selected by the Journal Pulp.
The contest will be open for two weeks from today: June 18, 2014, through July, 2014, at midnight.
Best First Sentence Contest
The Journal Pulp is offering a $100.00 cash prize for the following:
Best first sentence for a novel about a lovely librarian who secretly burns the books she loves because she wants no one else to read them.
You got the stuff?
Submit your work here: