So you wanna be a writer?

Taking some previous advice, I didn’t take a mouthful of coffee before reading the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest 2002 Results. Just as well really, as I’m fed up choking on my coffee.

The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is an international literary parody contest, the competition honors the memory if not the reputation of Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873). The goal of the contest is childishly simple: entrants are challenged to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels. Although best known for The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) and the phrase, “the pen is mightier than the sword,” Bulwer-Lytton opened his novel Paul Clifford (1830) with the immortal words that the “Peanuts” beagle Snoopy plagiarized for years, “It was a dark and stormy night.

Some funny funny stuff in there. You have been warned!