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

[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.