It was a dark and stormy night

[qatarperegrine]

The winners of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest were just announced.

If you haven't heard of the Bulwer-Lytton, it is a contest for the WORST opening line of a (non-existent) novel, named after the guy who started his 1830 book Paul Clifford with this infamous sentence:

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.

This year's winner is the following sentence, by Microsoft analyst Dan McKay:

As he stared at her ample bosom, he daydreamed of the dual Stromberg carburetors in his vintage Triumph Spitfire, highly functional yet pleasingly formed, perched prominently on top of the intake manifold, aching for experienced hands, the small knurled caps of the oil dampeners begging to be inspected and adjusted as described in chapter seven of the shop manual.

The list of other winners and runner-ups has a lot of sentences I like better, though. This one's my favorite:

Patricia wrote out the phrase 'It was a dark and stormy night' exactly seventy-two times, which was the same number of times she stabbed her now quickly-rotting husband, and the same number of pages she ripped out of 'He's Just Not That Into You' by Greg Behrendt to scatter around the room -- not because she was obsessive compulsive, or had any sentimental attachment to the number seventy-two, but because she'd always wanted to give those quacks at CSI a hard time.

Comments

[shmuelisms.livejournal.com]

I just love that competition! or it's look alike emails. The following line "is" straight out of Douglas Adams - "The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn't." (Russell Beland, Springfield)

[qatar.livejournal.com]

Substitute "ships," "hanging in the sky" and "brick" and there you go.... Think I should save this one for my workshop on plagiarism? :-)

Not really

[shmuelisms.livejournal.com]

I think the terms of the metaphors are enough UN-like each other, to NOT be considered an actual plagiarism. There is a strong chance that he was the unconscious inspiration, regarding style of metaphor. But you're the pro.

[y-pestis.livejournal.com]

I dunno, I quite like this one:

A column of five hundred Roman foot soldiers - a column held together by the plaster of courage -- advanced on a teeming sea of rebellious slaves -- slaves who had, ironically, built most of Rome's columns, although they actually used lime and not plaster to cement the structures, and though it is perhaps more historically precise to describe the soldiers' column as bound by the lime of courage, that doesn't really have the same adventurous ring to it.

And this one just killed me:

Horatio Keelhaul sailed buoyantly up Cutter Street ironclad in his resolve to torpedo the reviewer of his literary launches who threatened his Titanic reputation with accusations of relying solely on nautical parlance to propel his gondolaic characters through the sinuous canals of his plots.

But then again, there was this one:

It was Angela's 96th birthday party, and as she leaned over to blow out the candles on her cake and thought back on her long, long life, the children she'd given birth to, the man she had married and then sadly buried, she thought to herself, well no matter what at least I've grown old with dignity, then the nursing home attendant pointed out that her breasts were dipping in the trifle bowl again.

And I'll stop now. I love this contest.

[qatar.livejournal.com]

Hah! I missed the Roman column one. Those are excellent ones, too.