Now THIS is genuine written art!

[Zep]

Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, 2003 Results (http://www2.sjsu.edu/depts/english/2003.htm)
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."

[Zep]

What, no writers going to read some pure gold?

[HarryKeogh]

HA! this is funny stuff...

Detective Inspector Mike Norman slipped six fingers into his overcoat pocket, five of them clad in a latex glove and attached to his palm, while the sixth was wrapped in a plastic evidence bag and apparently belonged to the kidnapped pianist Ricardo Moore, or, as it now seemed likely, the kidnapped ex-pianist Ricardo Moore.

Alan Campbell
Edinburgh, Scotland

[Zep]

Indeed!Standing in the concessions car of the Orient Express as it hissed and lurched away from the station, Special Agent Chu could feel enemy eyes watching him from the inky shadows and knew that he was being tested, for although he had never tasted a plug of tobacco in his life, he was impersonating an arms dealer known to be a connoisseur, so he knew that he, the Chosen One, Chow Chu, had no choice but to choose the choicest chew on the choo-choo.

Loren Haarsma
Grand Rapids, MI

[Zep]

It only gets worse... The final auction item in the estate was the electric home in the frozen tundra, often referred to as "the top of the world," even though the world doesn't really have a top (or a bottom for that matter), and it was expected that Mrs. Claus, a pleasantly plump lady who smelled of cookie dough, would again have to outbid the jovial fat man's former employees to purchase his assets, that is until the gavel fell and the auctioneer announced solemnly, "The elves have left the building."

Jay Dardenne
Baton Rouge, LA