The winner of this year’s Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for worst opening sentence to an imaginary novel is about birds and windmills. Sure, it is not a scientific treatise, but anything that brings attention to this issue is good, right? And, wow, what a horrific sentence Sue Fondrie wrote: “Cheryl’s mind turned like the vanes of a wind-powered turbine, chopping her sparrow-like thoughts into bloody pieces that fell onto a growing pile of forgotten memories.”
Corey is a New Yorker who lived most of his life in upstate New York but has lived in Queens since 2008. He's only been birding since 2005 but has garnered a respectable life list by birding whenever he wasn't working as a union representative or spending time with his family. He lives in Forest Hills with Daisy, their son, Desmond Shearwater, and their indoor cat, B.B. His bird photographs have appeared on the Today Show, in Birding, Living Bird Magazine, Bird Watcher's Digest, and many other fine publications. He is also the author of the American Birding Association Field Guide to the Birds of New York.
That’s an awesomely gruesome sentence; its gruesomeness is manifest in both its cumbersome structure and the mental images it inspires in those who read it.