Gretchen Schmidt is, certifiably, one of the nation's worst writers. And she couldn't be prouder.
Her work? Here's a shining example: ''Jake liked his women the way he liked his kiwi fruit: sweet yet tart, firm-fleshed yet yielding to the touch, and covered with short brown fuzzy hair.''
Ouch. Bad. So bad, in fact, that Schmidt of Coral Gables is one of this year's winners of the Eighth International Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, dedicated to the encouragement and preservation of execrable prose.
Schmidt, 33, owner of a pair of shoe stores in South Florida called Margapita, won in Bulwer-Lytton's romance category for her description of Jake's taste in women.
''This to me is better than the lottery,'' Schmidt said.
The Bulwer-Lytton competition is run by good-humored (and iron-stomached) Scott Rice, a professor of English at San Jose State University. Writers from around the world construct the worst sentences they can and mail them in by April 15. (''Americans are making up stories for that deadline already,'' Rice says).
Schmidt, one of four winners, says she sent in about a half dozen entries this year.
She receives a genuine imitation parchment certificate for her work and inclusion in the next book of bad sentences collected from the contest.
This year's grand prize winner, from among 10,000 entries, was Ray C. Gainey of Indianapolis, for this: ''Professor Frobisher couldn't believe he had missed seeing it for so long - it was, after all, right there under his nose - but in all his years of research into the intricate and mysterious ways of the universe, he had never noticed that the freckles on his upperlip, just below and to the left of the nostril, partially hidden until now by the hairy mole he had just removed a week before, exactly matched the pattern of the stars
in the Pleiades, down to the angry red zit that had just popped up where he and his colleagues had only today discovered an exploding nova.''
The other two winners were:
Wayne D. Worthey of Washington, D.C., for detective fiction:
''Sgt. Tom Katt wasn't 100 percent sure of anything, but he knew something wasn't quite right when the factory foreman told him that the night-shift guard had fallen into a vat of baby oil and softened to death.''
Matthew Kaslow of Brooklyn, for vile puns: ''As Wilbur, long obsessed though unfamiliar with pointilism, escorted his wife, Katy, into the Modern wing of the local art museum, he exclaimed jubilantly, 'Kay, Seurat!, Seurat!,' to which she replied, yawningly, 'Whatever, Wilby, Wilby.' ''