The Literotica Bulwer-Lytton thread.

[electric1]

My own humble offering:

I, Jesse Michelson, was deeply outraged and felt horrified and betrayed when I learned from our offspring, Pat, right after Pat’s 18th birthday, that my spouse, Channing, had been slowly looking at Marlowe, my first born from my previous marriage to Rene Stevenson, the marriage I was so sure would last after my disastrous marriage to Tracy Johnson, so I screamed at Channing, “How could you??” and, with that, I slowly began to sob whilst Pat, for Pat’s part, slowly started patting me on the head.

 

[Actingup]

My own humble offering:

I, Jesse Michelson, was deeply outraged and felt horrified and betrayed when I learned from our offspring, Pat, right after Pat’s 18th birthday, that my spouse, Channing, had been slowly looking at Marlowe, my first born from my previous marriage to Rene Stevenson, the marriage I was so sure would last after my disastrous marriage to Tracy Johnson, so I screamed at Channing, “How could you??” and, with that, I slowly began to sob whilst Pat, for Pat’s part, slowly started patting me on the head.

The advantage of all those slowlies is that it gives us, the readers, enough time to pack the whole family into the car and get the hell out of town.

(I admit that I use the word quite often!)

 

[StillStunned]

It was night time, and the night was the best time, as surely as night followed day every day, no matter what foreigners in the far north and south of the world said, and what made the night so special was lying languidly in bed, playing idly with his balls and scratching absentmindedly at the hairs on his head.

 

[SimonDoom]

One day in late August, when the sun lazed in the air like a burned egg-yolk and its angry-bird rays deep-fried your skin to the hue of an overcooked churro, lovely, billowy-boobed Katie-Joe Thackenwaller and I ambled toward the water to experience sex on the beach for the first time, but we hadn't adequately accounted for the effect of hot sand on exposed body parts.

 

[TheLobster]

the effect of hot sand on exposed body parts.

“I hate it!” she mewled into my broad shoulder. “It’s coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere.”

 

[SmilingLez]

Through the labyrinthine corridors of self-deception, where flowery Victorian prose and calculated pet names served as mere props in an elaborate performance of sophistication, she discovered - much like a moth realizing its fatal attraction to artificial light - that true authenticity lay not in the carefully crafted personas she wore like ill-fitting masks, but in the raw, unvarnished truth she had so desperately tried to obscure beneath layers of literary affectation.

 

[ShelbyDawn57]

I honestly think the overall quality of Literotica could be increased 20% by simply banning the word "slowly."

Can I replace it with ‘crept on in its petty pace’?

 

[yowser]

As the slanting moonlight shone through the old farmhouse’s multi-paned windows, leaving rhombus shapes of light on the floor, their wide wooden planks shouldering the old brass bed that I was most anxious to next inhabit, Melody Lightfoot, the wet dream of every boy in the senior class of Edgewood High, had undone the last bottom button of her excessively formal, white, organic cotton Oxford shirt, and flung open the front to reveal the previously forbidden treasures, braless no less, which I had only ever been able to dream of for almost a decade, when I inhaled, a reckless act of hyperventilation that almost literally floored me before my moments of pleasure had even had a chance to begin.

 

[MillieDynamite]

Good Lord, you guys are still proving just how bad, rotten awful can get.

 

[Actingup]

"Good Lord, you guys are still proving just how bad, rotten awful can get," she said as she walked late into the writers' club rooms, carrying a good Australian Shiraz as though it was the answer to all of their problems instead of just being a helping hand on the path to literary self-immolation.

Never knock a good Shiraz when you're writing an opening line.

 

[MillieDynamite]

LOL

Never knock a good Shiraz when you're writing an opening line.

 

[Publius68]

He sat down at his computer, an older Macbook Pro model with a dent in the scuffed aluminum cover that Apple said made it unrepairable, so he’d have to replace it if he wanted to stop having to deal with that dead pixel, and scratched his head before taking a deep, cleansing breath in preparation for writing the ultimate Bulwer-Lytton opening sentance—a sentance, he projected, that would go on for untold bytes of data, encompassing many details so small and insignificant, yet frustratingly, tantalizingly uneditable, that they would all be buried, lost in the reader’s mind, by the overwhelming weight, the weight of a thousand elephants with eating disorders, of the sentance that it would make no sense at all, a sentance that would be his labyrinthine magnum opus, but as he began to type, his vision was washed away with the tears that flowed, tears of despair, tears of utter desolation, we are talking the desolation of the desolate survivors of The Desolation of Smaug here, folks, tears that sprang so horribly involuntarily from the sudden and overwhelming realization, a realization that cut him to the quick, that he wrote three such sentances every page of every story he had posted to Literotica...

 

[Actingup]

He sat down at his computer, an older Macbook Pro model with a dent in the scuffed aluminum cover that Apple said made it unrepairable, so he’d have to replace it if he wanted to stop having to deal with that dead pixel, and scratched his head before taking a deep, cleansing breath in preparation for writing the ultimate Bulwer-Lytton opening sentance—a sentance, he projected, that would go on for untold bytes of data, encompassing many details so small and insignificant, yet frustratingly, tantalizingly uneditable, that they would all be buried, lost in the reader’s mind, by the overwhelming weight, the weight of a thousand elephants with eating disorders, of the sentance that it would make no sense at all, a sentance that would be his labyrinthine magnum opus, but as he began to type, his vision was washed away with the tears that flowed, tears of despair, tears of utter desolation, we are talking the desolation of the desolate survivors of The Desolation of Smaug here, folks, tears that sprang so horribly involuntarily from the sudden and overwhelming realization, a realization that cut him to the quick, that he wrote three such sentances every page of every story he had posted to Literotica...

That’s uncomfortably close to realism…

 

[yowser]

An interesting exercise, reminds me of the way Frank Zappa was able to get very good musicians to produce very bad music in the Captain Beefheart Days. (Not trying to draw parallels Simon.)

So far 79 memorable first lines, many of them capable of turning into intriguing stories, particularly if the sentences following are an improvement over the first.

Trivia:

39 authors, many with multiple efforts.

4 rule breaking entries, but included since editing to one sentence wouldn't be difficult.

Sentence length averages 59 words, with a low of 5 and a high of 205. (11 are over 100 words.)

26 First Person POV
42 Third POV
1 Second POV
Customised software identifies 34 as erotic, 36 as pornographic and 9 as neutral or ambiguous.

Here's a list of opening phrases:

It was a gray and cloudy Tuesday
He'd never thought of his sister
The midday sun blazed down
I think I offended mom
It was cold outside
It was a dark and steamy night
You are probably wondering
Her bra was a 34D
It was a dark and stormy night
He was the biggest wiseass
Did you guys hear about that one guy last week?
Freedom.
My two favorite things
To those persons with Literotica authorly ambitions
It was a dark and story night
The sun had gone down
She was the best of fucks,
It was a dark and story night
He wore dark and stormy tights
I'd never have fucked
The upset 'Oook!' echoed across
It was a morbidly dark and furiously stormy night
I can't wait for you
Most days Todd stayed in bed
“Fuck,” Todd breathed out
Though, at the time, Susan
I suddenly realized
"I want your man-meat to please me now,
“Holy crap, this is going to be ugly!”
Her grool drizzled off my lip
A dog barked, solitary, lonesome
Call me DILF
The button of her clit
When she breezed
Mary was eighteen
Jim Bob's cock whooshed up
While the savage thrusts
Mom's untrimmed bush
It was a Dark 'n Stormy night
I stood in front of the mirror
Mom, mom, light of my life
Bob looked like a giant dick.
Bobby, be a deer and unzip me
"Well, doesn't that look like fun
The ground was rhythmically rocking
His hands went directly
"The thing is, love,"
"Fancy a bita strange,"
With the ease of long practice
“I want you to listen closely,”
She resisted when I tried
Claire was the best of moms,
In a little house,
Ambling along the sidewalk
The moment Marla slammed the bedroom door
Tanya leant over the desk
"Screw me, you sexy seducer,
JoJo was a man who thought he was a loner,
It was a bright and sunny night
Listen, after you've been on a six month
Megan was pretty proud
"Hell of a way to resurrect a thread,
My uncle Morgan's talents
Having an hour at home alone
It was a stark and foamy knight
A bead of sweat formed on his brow
Mighty hunter Dex Wintergreen
"I'll have the usual,"
They met at a dingy dive bar
Alas, though I am surrounded
“Little brother?” gasped Thom
Jason's first conscious thought was, 'Oooowww.'
Does losing one's virginity
I, Jesse Michelson,
It was night time
One day in late August
Through the labyrinthine corridors
As the slanting moonlight shone
He sat down at his computer


Good work all.

 

[PennyThompson]

Yowser settled into his vintage leather Eames chair and cracked his knuckles before opening a spreadsheet and analyzing the thread, sighing with pleasant satisfaction because he knew that the most erotic part of a man's body was his dick, but the second most erotic part was his mind.

 

[MillieDynamite]

An erotic mind is a terrible thing to waste.

 

[yowser]

Yowser settled into his vintage leather Eames chair and cracked his knuckles before opening a spreadsheet and analyzing the thread, sighing with pleasant satisfaction because he knew that the most erotic part of a man's body was his dick, but the second most erotic part was his mind.

You read into my soul.

 

[PennyThompson]

You read into my soul.

or maybe I just wanted to make you update your list of opening lines with your own name

 

[electric1]

“Your eight-and-three-sixteenths-inch penis would feel great starting to slide slowly between my 36 AA breasts,” she intoned sexily.

 

[Areala-chan]

I could think of no specific reason why the mob of genetically-degraded hillbillies had taken it upon themselves to surround my vehicle, a thoroughly average Datsun with four-figure price tag and six-figure odometer reading, but curiosity being what it is, I allowed them to approach closer, more from sociological and scientific interest than anything else, and thus it was no surprise when the largest and ugliest of the inbred imbeciles leaned his face into the passenger side of my car, his gaze sweeping first across the books scattered on my front seat before settling on me with the most heinous look of confusion and anger before he opened his mouth and deigned to speak (I use the term quite loosely) the following words: "Now, see, Mr. Gibson, the way we all reckon, they prolly do things different in the city where you're from, but 'round these parts, we consider it a grave insult to set a fella's pecker on fire just cuz he got it on with your sister behind the Diffendorfer's tool shed."

 

[AwkwardlySet]

The late-summer sun shone brilliantly in the cloudless sky, bathing the street in a warm, pleasant glow that seemed to suggest anything was possible.

This is the opening sentence of a story (not a Lit one). What the fuck does that sentence even mean?

 

[UsuallyPresent]

The late-summer sun shone brilliantly in the cloudless sky, bathing the street in a warm, pleasant glow that seemed to suggest anything was possible.

This is the opening sentence of a story (not a Lit one). What the fuck does that sentence even mean?

It's day time and clear-skied.

 

[StillStunned]

The late-summer sun shone brilliantly in the cloudless sky, bathing the street in a warm, pleasant glow that seemed to suggest anything was possible.

This is the opening sentence of a story (not a Lit one). What the fuck does that sentence even mean?

I don't think it's bad at all. It sets a scene, and gives you the POV character's state of mind: the sun is shining and they're feeling optimistic.

 

[SimonDoom]

I could think of no specific reason why the mob of genetically-degraded hillbillies had taken it upon themselves to surround my vehicle, a thoroughly average Datsun with four-figure price tag and six-figure odometer reading, but curiosity being what it is, I allowed them to approach closer, more from sociological and scientific interest than anything else, and thus it was no surprise when the largest and ugliest of the inbred imbeciles leaned his face into the passenger side of my car, his gaze sweeping first across the books scattered on my front seat before settling on me with the most heinous look of confusion and anger before he opened his mouth and deigned to speak (I use the term quite loosely) the following words: "Now, see, Mr. Gibson, the way we all reckon, they prolly do things different in the city where you're from, but 'round these parts, we consider it a grave insult to set a fella's pecker on fire just cuz he got it on with your sister behind the Diffendorfer's tool shed."

Impressive.

 

[AwkwardlySet]

I don't think it's bad at all. It sets a scene, and gives you the POV character's state of mind: the sun is shining and they're feeling optimistic.

A glow that suggests anything is possible? I think it's senseless, but de gustibus, I suppose.
Also, reading a few sentences further, the MC's mood is anything but optimistic. So I guess that the point was that the glow of the sun generally makes people think that anything is possible.