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.”
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.