It was a dark and stormy night...

Truely, it is a dark and stormy night tonight and everytime I think of that phrase I immediately think of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction contest. If you are ever bored and want a laugh, I am telling you that you need to check this out. The contest is pretty simple. People write the opening sentence to the "worst of all possible novels." The contest was started by a guy named Professor Scott Rice, who was supposed to write a paper on a Victorian novelist for some reason. Anyway, he chose a guy named Edward George Bulwer-Lytton and after reading some of his stuff he ended up starting the contest.

Now you might think that you don't know who this guy is, but I am positive that even though you might not know his name, you know his work. Some of the phrases he's coined are "the pen is mightier than the sword," "the great unwashed," and "the almighty dollar," not to mention, "It was a dark and stormy night."

Here is the entire first paragraph of his book "Paul Clifford":

"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents--except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."
--Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, (1830)

Here are some of the past winners:

The bone-chilling scream split the warm summer night in two, the first half being before the scream when it was fairly balmy and calm and pleasant for those who hadn't heard the scream at all, but not calm or balmy or even very nice for those who did hear the scream, discounting the little period of time during the actual scream itself when your ears might have been hearing it but your brain wasn't reacting yet to let you know.
--Patricia E. Presutti, Lewiston, New York (1986 Winner)

****
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 upper lip, just below and to the left of the nostril, partially hidden until now by a hairy mole he had just removed a week before, exactly matched the pattern of the stars in the Pleides, down to the angry red zit that had just popped up where he and his colleagues had only today discovered an exploding nova.
--Ray C. Gainey, Indianapolis, Indiana (1989 Winner)

****
Dolores breezed along the surface of her life like a flat stone forever skipping across smooth water, rippling reality sporadically but oblivious to it consistently, until she finally lost momentum, sank, due to an overdose of fluoride as a child which caused her to lie forever on the floor of her life as useless as an appendix and as lonely as a five-hundred-pound barbell in a steroid-free fitness center.
--Linda Vernon, Newark, California (1990 Winner)

****
Paul Revere had just discovered that someone in Boston was a spy for the British, and when he saw the young woman believed to be the spy's girlfriend in an Italian restaurant he said to the waiter, "Hold the spumoni--I'm going to follow the chick an' catch a Tory."
--John L. Ashman, Houston, Texas (1995 Winner)

****
Joanne watched her fellow passengers - a wizened man reading about alchemy; an oversized bearded man-child; a haunted, bespectacled young man with a scar; and a gaggle of private school children who chatted ceaselessly about Latin and flying around the hockey pitch and the two-faced teacher who they thought was a witch - there was a story here, she decided.
Tim EllisHaslemere, U.K. 2008

****
I'm convinced that the Doc is dealing drugs to most of the mining crew because they either can't stay awake, constantly sneeze, grin like maniacs, or won't look you straight in the eye (not to mention behaving like a moron) and they wonder why a dwarf gets grumpy!
Neil ProwdCharnwood, ACT, Australia 2008

Those are just a few of the selections that you can pass your time reading and enjoying. Check it out sometime: www.bulwer-lytton.com