h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

"A grotesque comparison of a steamy love affair to a New York City street has won a Washington man this year's grand prize in an annual contest of bad writing.

Garrison Spik, a 41-year-old communications director and writer, took top honors in San Jose State University's 26th annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest with this opening sentence to a nonexistent novel:

"Theirs was a New York love, a checkered taxi ride burning rubber, and like the city their passion was open 24/7, steam rising from their bodies like slick streets exhaling warm, moist, white breath through manhole covers stamped 'Forged by DeLaney Bros., Piscataway, N.J.'"

The contest is named after Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton, whose 1830 novel "Paul Clifford" famously begins "It was a dark and stormy night."

Entrants are asked to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels. Awards are given for many categories, including awards for "purple prose" and "vile puns." The top winner receives a $250 prize.

Other noteworthy submissions:

"'Toads of glory, slugs of joy,' sang Groin the dwarf as he trotted jovially down the path before a great dragon ate him because the author knew that this story was a train wreck after he typed the first few words."

• Alex Hall, Greeley, Colo.

"Like a mechanic who forgets to wipe his hands on a shop rag and then goes home, hugs his wife, and gets a grease stain on her favorite sweater — love touches you, and marks you forever."

• Beth Fand Incollingo, Haddon Heights, N.J."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/odd_worst_writing;_ylt=AhAERJA.dPD6So3F1X9Llg3tiBIF

Come on Hootoo - we've got worse writers than that

"Oh, I do love a challenge" he snarled, as the milk for his good-night cocoa boiled over.

Any prizes, SWL?

He was a dark and wormy knight.

RF

A22547829

Thanks for that B'El. I never thought to look.

I happened to know the entry. Not sure I'd have looked for it otherwise.

Cal could write badder!

A8248241

Oh deary deary me.

I always thought that 'It was a dark and stormy night' was an example of good prose.

Deke

It wasn't so much that he cared, it wasn't so much that he puzzled, it was more that he plummited very fast and went splat forty-two floors below.

Capital letters *and* punctuation! Are you ok 2legs?!

"Chips!" He said, and his moustache quivered in a way that once she'd found irresistable, but which now reminded her of a small terrier shaking it's leg after a badly aimed jet of urine had soaked it.

not sure how but I mixed you up with blicky

In a heaving, sweating dervish of bacchanalian and terpsichorean rapture, the august steward and the innocent debutante explored each other and with each caress found new and ever more forbidden channels of concupiscence, their glistening skins juxtaposed against the steam-stained glass of the carriage window; clamouring for futures past, and pasts present, as they edged toward a crescendo of indignity so rapt with release from the torment of privation and humility as would shake the very sleepers from their moorings; yet, with all their new-found knowledge of eath other unaware that minutes from now their bodies would lie utterly dead, a gnarled crimson terror, locked in mortal embrace; the seventh name of Belial carved into their grateful, yielding flesh as they became the first of many deserving servants to my masterpiece of murder on the prurient express.

Did I win then?

"Dear Christopher" he said scathingly, whilst kindly ignoring the underwhelming evidence, "You win neither now nor thence", turned on his right heel, knocked (accidentally, he told himself) over the aspidistra and left.

- I haven't a chance of turning out any of this but I'm having a helluva laugh reading it.

'It was a dark and stormy night' is the opening line of book 2 of The Three Musketeers. It summed up the scene quite succinctly too..

"The night was dark. It was also stormy. Come to think of it, it wasn't really night at all, but that strange time between about half seven and ten when it seems to be getting a bit late to be evening but it's still a bit light out. Or it would have been light out, was this evening not a particularly dark one."

The quivering flesh quivered like a glass bowl indignantly apraising altogether too hard on an uninteligable quasi-blue ribbon tied ever-so-slightly too tight about a muffin of its own devine creation, as the sun lowered ever lower in the sky as if a summoning hand drew the light away from the scene before it in order to escape the efemarial nature of life closed too quickly by an atomic explosion.

Oh, how she spent the interminably long days longing for his chemical smell. Such is the life of the wife of an intrepid telephone sanitiser.