###

From the Novel: "Paul Clifford". (Publ. 1830).

"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."

###

What follows is an example of what would likely be a winning entry for this exacting contest: a recent year's ACTUAL triumph in the International Version of the same!

###

"Theirs was a New York love, a checkered taxi ride burning rubber, and like the city their passion was open 24/7, steam rising from their bodies like slick streets exhaling warm, moist, white breath through manhole covers stamped 'Forged by DeLaney Bros., Piscataway, N.J.' "

###

What I'm looking for is not full-on parody so much as something that would work in a 19th-century context as well as a free-form, contemporary one. So here is the challenge. Mimic pre-turn of the LAST century's flowery prosody within a 35-70 word run-on sentence, with the resulting construction still----as we say----"HOOKin'."

If there are enough entries, we'll vote for the top three, per usual. Contest ends one week from today, Monday.

What this excercise entails is to develop a sense of legitimately contemporary art prose, with still a tip of the hat, which can be ironic, to the masters of it of the 19th C.

###

MORE INFO

A useful resource is here. (It's sorta a university handout.)--> http://www.cwu.edu/~writingcenter/resources/handouts/new_imagery.pdf Note that in its right column, Barbara Kingsolver's line is shown to be ornamented with adjectives and adverbs that pass muster with editors nowadays whereas within its left column Syliva Shriner shows how Bulwer-Lytton's concern with rythm and cadence would never make it past the sharp quills of Mssrs. Strunk or White of "Modernity." (For example, in the above line I was about to write "rhythmic cadence," for reasons of the phrase's iambic flow, adjoining of its c-sounds and echo to the phrase's meaning, but stylists today would simply consider such a construction redundant.)