Second Effort for Bulwer-Lytton

Founded in 1982 at San Jose State University in California, the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest challenged entrants to compose opening sentences to the worst of all possible novels. None of my entries were published and as explained here none will ever be. My somewhat random writing log tells me I sent this one, but it may not have been my second effort as it is titled.

Army veteran Clayton Manning dabbling in fiction hoping to hit the market as a modern Raymond Chandler adding to his Philip Marlowe series or Mickey Spillane doing another Mike Hammer book but never gets a word published and not having a Kate Becket like Richard Castle did, he decides to take his teacher’s advice, “Write what you know,” and opens his own PI agency above a deteriorating secondhand music store in a small Texas town near Dallas, but in solving his first case he uncovers a deeply covert national security issue he cannot and will not dare to expose to his prospective reading audience even as fiction or innuendo.

For reasons I cannot explain, I say, having repeated myself over and over again, I do therefore declare again: I am often random, so another post may interrupt the series I first intended to post in sequence.