[joylyn]

Actually, "It was a dark and stormy night." was a great opening sentence when Bulwer-Lytton wrote it. There's a reason why other people steal words and turn them into cliches.
I enjoy these entries, but the contestants are practicing in a vein of bad writing that Bulwer-Lytton would have scorned. Maybe the contest should be renamed in honor of the author of The DaVinci Code...

[cloud8]

> Actually, "It was a dark and stormy night." was a great opening sentence when Bulwer-Lytton wrote it.

It still is. Even greater: "Call me Ishmael."

> I enjoy these entries, but the contestants are practicing in a vein of bad writing that Bulwer-Lytton would have scorned.

I think I might have started reading Last Days of Pompeii many years ago...

Remember the Bad Hemingway Contest? Now that was a hoot :)

[Hiddigeigei]

Bulwer-Lytton was a great (or near great writer). It pains me that a contest for bad writing should bear his name because of a line in a comic strip.

130 odd years after his death, some of his novels are still in print. Several movies have been based on his writings as well as a Wagnerian opera. He coined such phrases as "The pen is mightier than the sword' and (although credited elsewhere) "Government of the people, by the people...etc." The latter quote is from his novel Rienzi (1835), which had considerable influence on Northern thinking during the Civil War.