Let your pet words have a field day

[kate_schaefer]

All writers have pet words that rarely get to come out and play: crepuscular, epicine, exiguous, orts, lenticular, tope, modulo, etrog, groak, squamous, the entire contents of Mrs. Byrne's Dictionary of Unusual, Obscure, and Preposterous Words. Here's a contest that will let you -- nay, encourage you with blandishments irresistible, summon you with a siren's call, exercise a gravitational pull upon your very heart's core -- use those words, every last one of them, and some of them twice or thrice.

It's the R. L Fanthorpe Write-Alike Contest to benefit the Susan C. Petrey Clarion Scholarship Fund. Starting in 1982, the Petrey fund has helped send 41 beginning writers to Clarion or Clarion West, including Kathe Koja, Syne Mitchell, Nisi Shawl, Barth Anderson, Eric Witchey, and Heather Lindsley. It also sponsors one Clarion West instructor each year as the Susan C. Petrey Fellow. The Petrey fund is near and dear to my heart.

R. L. Fanthorpe is science fiction's answer to Bulwer-Lytton. Since science fiction is a more modern, forward-thinking variety of fiction than the Victorian novel, Fanthorpe is still alive and quite cheerful on the subject of his prolix writing (prolix! There's another of those pet words!). He came to Orycon a few years back and served as auctioneer for the Petrey auction. He cooperated with Debbie Cross, the Petrey administrator, when she put together Down the Badger Hole: R. Lionel Fanthorpe: The Badger Years, a fine collection of the choice bad bits from his work (my long-time favorite: "The city slept. Men slept. Women slept. Children slept. Dogs and cats slept.").

Okay, okay, enough explanation of the background. You want to enter this contest. You do, really. You want a reason to write a few pages free of the influence of Raymond Carver, free of the need to justify every goddamn word, free of the need to be really good yet constrained by the desire to outbad the Badgers.

It's only 600 words, and it has to be in the hands of the judges by October 10, 2006. It costs $10 to enter (that's the benefit part), and there will be prizes as well as glory and ignominy.

As Gardner Dozois says, how long could it take? How bad could it be?

Thanks to davidlevine for the reminder.

Comments

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Bad woman. Now I'll have to read some Fanthorpe. Where am I supposed to lay hands on some Fanthorpe?

[kate-schaefer.livejournal.com]

Fortuitously, you already have some Fanthorpe, because you attended Potlatch 15. Since you worked on the convention, you probably didn't look at your freebie bag after you finished collating it, but contained within its capacious depths (I'm practicing writing like Fanthorpe here; every gratuitous adjective and adverb that I'd normally excise is now included) is a copy of Down the Badger Hole.

Let me throw out another not-entirely-randomly-chosen gem: "His mind became filled with unanswerable question marks. He tried to ponder the imponderable; he tried to answer the unanswerable; he tried to believe the unbelievable, and to comprehend the incomprehensive. The result of these valiant mental efforts was a headache, so he lay back on the raft and relaxed; there was nothing else he could do."

Debbie Cross read all the works of R. Lionel Fanthorpe, Pel Torro, Peter O'Flynn, Oben Lerteth (Oben Lerteth?), Bron Fane, Rene Rolant, Elton T. Neef, John E. Muller, Deutero Spartacus (Deutero Spartacus?), Neil Balfort, Robin Tate, Othello Baron, and several other names, so we don't have to.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

oh. i am an idiot. well, it must be around somewhere's then.

My prose will swell ponderously, puff obscenely, indeed bloat and distend like some huge, overblown very large thing, with a bigness incredible, just as soon as I undo all the work I've been doing trying to cut out those repetitious redundancies and cease strangulation of all previous propinquities for the purple.

[jess-ka.livejournal.com]

Hey, I jsut used the word crepuscular in something I'm perfectly serious about. So I guess I better whip up something for the contest.

[kate-schaefer.livejournal.com]

I love crepuscular. When I was a medium-sized child, I confused it with crenellated. Disconcertingly, neither of these makes it into Mrs. Byrne's, although she does have the extremely similar crenulated.

All I'm lacking for my contest entry is a plot and some characters; I have all the words I need...

[jess-ka.livejournal.com]

Mm, crenulated.

Words. Yum.