The Best of the Worst

From time to time, one must simply stop and marvel at a sentence such as this:

She smoothed the hair back from her elfin ears, making it tumble down her back, past her shoulders, broad but not too broad, broad enough to support the luxurious breasts that filled the front of her scarlet sun dress, glowing in the afternoon sun, the hot Georgia orb of fire, that came through the window, as she admired her trim shape and flat tummy, in the mirror.

This comes from a deliberately bad book called Atlanta Nights (on sale here), which was a team project designed to put the lie to a bad publisher. (The story, plus an excerpted chapter, can be found on Teresa Nielsen Hayden's site here.)

In short, it goes like this: an organization called the Science Fiction Writers of America hosts, as a part of its website, the valuable "Writer Beware" section, the purpose of which is to help novice writers avoid various scams and pitfalls. (It includes the most recent edition of the Twenty Worst Agents in America; and offers all the sound reasons why, for instance, you should never ever pay "reading fees" to agents.) The good folks at the SFWA had been keeping an eye on a so-called publisher called "PublishAmerica," and noted one day that PublishAmerica had seen fit to assail the credibility of science fiction and fantasy writers, saying that writers in these genres are hacks because they supposedly believe that "SciFi, because it is set in a distant future, does not require believable storylines, or that Fantasy, because it is set in conditions that have never existed, does not need believable every-day characters." The implication was that PublishAmerica stands for real literature and couldn't be bothered with such lame storytelling. Naturally, for members of an organization called the Science Fiction Writers of America, the game was afoot.

A group of SFWA members decidedly to collectively test the high standards of PublishAmerica. They split between them the chapters of a deliberately awful book, the above-mentioned Atlanta Nights, and spent a happy weekend writing just as badly as they possibly could. Naturally, this high-falutin' publisher was happy to accept the book for publication, and a certain kind of literary history was born. Go ahead and read the more detailed version of the story at Ms. Hayden's site, but above all, be sure to read the excerpted chapter. It will brighten anyone's day, I promise.

Oh, and for more bad writing, there is always the Bulwer-Lytton Society's legendary "It Was a Dark and Stormy Night" contest.