Great beginnings

By Compiled by Times staff writer

© St. Petersburg Times, published August 13, 2000

When Victorian author Edward George Bulwer-Lytton penned, "It was a dark and stormy night," little did he know he would become the poster boy for bad writing. There's even a contest named after him, which invites participants to write only the first line of a bad novel. Here are eight runners-up in this year's Bulwer-Lytton contest:

9. Just beyond the Narrows the river widens.

8. With a curvaceous figure that Venus would have envied, a tanned, unblemished oval face framed with lustrous thick brown hair, deep azure-blue eyes fringed with long black lashes, perfect teeth that vied for competition, and a small straight nose, Marilee had a beauty that defied description.

7. Andre, a simple peasant, had only one thing on his mind as he crept along the East wall: Andre creep . . . Andre creep . . . Andre creep.

6. Stanislaus Smedley, a man always on the cutting edge of narcissism, was about to give his body and soul to a back-alley sex-change surgeon to become the woman he loved.

5. Although Sarah had an abnormal fear of mice, it did not keep her from eeking out a living at a local pet store.

4. Stanley looked quite bored and somewhat detached, but then penguins often do.

3. Like an overripe beefsteak tomato rimmed with cottage cheese, the corpulent remains of Santa Claus lay dead on the hotel floor.

2. Mike Hardware was the kind of private eye who didn't know the meaning of the word fear, a man who could laugh in the face of danger and spit in the eye of death -- in short, a moron with suicidal tendencies.

And the winner is:

1. The sun oozed over the horizon, shoved aside darkness, crept along the greensward, and, with sickly fingers, pushed through the castle window, revealing the pillaged princess, hand at throat, crown asunder, gaping in frenzied horror at the sated, sodden amphibian lying beside her, disbelieving the magnitude of the frog's deception, screaming madly, "You lied!"

"After London it was serious."

-- Opening line of Sudden Times, by Dermot Healy, due out this month from Harcourt Brace ($23)

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