# a dark and stormy night

Category: Joke Board

## Post 1 by blbobby (Ooo you're gona like this!) on Wednesday, 24-May-2006 18:46:27

This year's 10 winners of the Bulwer-Lytton contest,(aka "Dark and Stormy Night Contest") run by the English Dept. of San Jose State University, wherein
one writes only the first line of a bad novel:
10) "As a scientist, Throckmorton knew that if he were ever to break wind in the echo chamber, he would never hear the end of it."
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 eeeking out a living at a local pet store."
4) "Stanley looked quite bored and somewhat detached, but then penguins often do."
3) "Like an over-ripe 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...
"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!"

## Post 2 by Harp (I've now got the bronze prolific poster award! now going for the silver award!) on Wednesday, 24-May-2006 18:54:43

some of those were extremely good

## Post 3 by Blue Velvet (I've got the platinum golden silver bronze poster award.) on Wednesday, 24-May-2006 19:53:16

hahahaha I liked those.

## Post 4 by Grace (I've now got the ggold prolific poster award! wahoo! well done to me!) on Wednesday, 24-May-2006 21:13:55

*Connie runs to get her Journal as storm clouds gather while midnight lurks on the horizon thinking, I could get an award for writing even better first lines to a bad novel… *grins

## Post 5 by blbobby (Ooo you're gona like this!) on Wednesday, 24-May-2006 22:23:55

Hey, cg, that's funny. I started to respond in kind, but don't have the literary skills to come up with a really good bad first line.

## Post 6 by Grace (I've now got the ggold prolific poster award! wahoo! well done to me!) on Wednesday, 24-May-2006 22:29:03

That is due to the fact that your literary skills are so far advanced that you have not any bad lines...

## Post 7 by blbobby (Ooo you're gona like this!) on Thursday, 25-May-2006 3:54:09

One dark and stormy night the old guy sat at his keyboard saying: "let's see? Let's see? Let's see? ...

## Post 8 by Grace (I've now got the ggold prolific poster award! wahoo! well done to me!) on Thursday, 25-May-2006 4:12:15

o.k. Bob I concede…you win!!!! *great BIG Grin

## Post 9 by Goblin (I have proven to myself and the world that I need mental help) on Thursday, 25-May-2006 10:55:13

LOL! One dark and stormy night the booze addled writer, sat brooding over a pint of Guinness a week old, he was trying to cut down.

## Post 10 by chelslicious (like it or not, I'm gonna say what I mean. all the time.) on Thursday, 25-May-2006 20:47:09

lol, good one!

## Post 11 by blbobby (Ooo you're gona like this!) on Friday, 26-May-2006 0:27:03

goblin, I like that.

## Post 12 by Goblin (I have proven to myself and the world that I need mental help) on Friday, 26-May-2006 9:07:24

Cheers I was brooding over a Guinness 2 hours before writing that and it was anything but stale.

## Post 13 by blbobby (Ooo you're gona like this!) on Friday, 26-May-2006 9:13:29

Shoulda guessed.

## Post 14 by Goblin (I have proven to myself and the world that I need mental help) on Friday, 26-May-2006 9:20:56

Cheek! smile. I was hoping not to infer anything y'know.

## Post 15 by blbobby (Ooo you're gona like this!) on Friday, 26-May-2006 11:48:33

yeah right.

## Post 16 by Goblin (I have proven to myself and the world that I need mental help) on Saturday, 27-May-2006 8:49:30

I dont have a drink problem..shit! deletes the number of the AA.

## Post 17 by blbobby (Ooo you're gona like this!) on Saturday, 27-May-2006 10:30:52

1-800-drinkit

## Post 18 by Goblin (I have proven to myself and the world that I need mental help) on Sunday, 28-May-2006 9:16:54

Hahaha I see, ok, is that a hint?

## Post 19 by Susanne (move over school!) on Tuesday, 30-May-2006 15:02:12

Oh my God, these are awesome. I wonder if the people set out to write the first sentence of a bad novel, or if they actually thought they were writing something good, and someone else submitted it on their behalf?

## Post 20 by blbobby (Ooo you're gona like this!) on Tuesday, 30-May-2006 15:57:56

Damn, you made me do a little research. "
An international literary parody contest, the competition honors the memory (if not the reputation) of Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton
(1803-1873). 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), which has been made into a movie three times, originating the expression "the pen is mightier than the sword," and
phrases like "the great unwashed" and "the almighty dollar," 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."
The contest began in 1982 as a quiet campus affair, attracting only three submissions. This response being a thunderous success by academic standards, the
contest went public the following year and ever since has attracted thousands of annual entries from all over the world."
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.
Dan McKay
Fargo, ND
A 43-year-old quantitative analyst for Microsoft Great Plains is the winner of the 23rd running of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. A resident of Fargo,
North Dakota, McKay is currently visiting China, perhaps to escape notoriety for his dubious literary achievement.

## Post 21 by Grace (I've now got the ggold prolific poster award! wahoo! well done to me!) on Tuesday, 30-May-2006 18:59:21

And The Zone's own prized winner with the starting line of, "One dark and stormy night the old guy sat at his keyboard saying: "let's see? Let's see? Let's see? ..." continues to inform and delight us all on this day that is quickly turning into fall of night as the storms with lightening bolts strike giving their own utternance if only we have ears to hear as gusts of rain wash......

## Post 22 by blbobby (Ooo you're gona like this!) on Friday, 15-Dec-2006 11:01:04

Based on a short quick note between Grace (cg/connie) and myself, I wanted to revise this topic and challenge other zoners to submit bad, really bad, beginnings sentences to novels never written.
We'll see how it goes.
Bob

## Post 23 by Grace (I've now got the ggold prolific poster award! wahoo! well done to me!) on Friday, 15-Dec-2006 15:26:23

o.k. Bob,
So you really are out to prove to the world (well the Zone BBS part of the world) that you were right and I was ..not so right...maybe more so to the left..
anyhow, so it was a dark and stormy night and not a cold rainy night *sighs with a smile*
In the search to locate book titles for the Board Game A-Z of Book Titles, was enabled to located this one by H.G.Wells titled: The Valley of Spiders, with an opening line that goes like this...
Towards mid-day the three pursuers came abruptly round a bend in
the torrent bed upon the sight of a very broad and spacious valley.
The difficult and winding trench of pebbles along which they had
tracked the fugitives for so long, expanded to a broad slope,
and with a common impulse the three men left the trail, and rode
to a little eminence set with olive-dun trees, and there halted,
the two others, as became them, a little behind the man with
the silver-studded bridle.
o.K. Bob the first line is included as requested and went on to simply included the first paragraph in its entirity..
Talk laters,
Grace (cg/connie)

## Post 24 by blbobby (Ooo you're gona like this!) on Friday, 15-Dec-2006 18:40:45

Holy jeez, that's good. I'll go peruse my book collection for first liners Grace.
Bob

## Post 25 by blbobby (Ooo you're gona like this!) on Friday, 15-Dec-2006 18:48:51

I don't think this is as good as Grace's is, but here's the first sentence in Silas Marner by George Eliot who was a lady but I don't remember her name but here is the first sentence.
"In the days when the spinning-wheels hummed busily in the farmhouses--
and even great ladies, clothed in silk and thread-lace, had their
toy spinning-wheels of polished oak--there might be seen in
districts far away among the lanes, or deep in the bosom of the
hills, certain pallid undersized men, who, by the side of the brawny
country-folk, looked like the remnants of a disinherited race."
Silas Marner is not a horor story, though you couldn't tell it from this beginning. Ms. Elliot is just describing a mere shepherd.
Bob

## Post 26 by Grace (I've now got the ggold prolific poster award! wahoo! well done to me!) on Friday, 15-Dec-2006 22:07:28

o.K. now you did it Bob,
You got me hooked *and hope-fully not to be an eventual one sunk*
...anyhow off in search of first liner paragraphs..
..bobbin' along aTop the waters, floating for now with a splash of a fin..
Ahh swimmingly good time.. *pondering "Where at?" for here in Michigan though snow not about...yet the waters of this night, cold and wet of the Great Lakes 5!
Grace (cg/connie)

## Post 27 by Grace (I've now got the ggold prolific poster award! wahoo! well done to me!) on Saturday, 16-Dec-2006 21:32:03

...and BlBobby, speaking of mere shepherds, here found a writing, Titled: the Midnight Dash ~ By: Pat Johnson with the first of the writing here bestowed... though noting that there is no mention of ither the MidNight being cold and wet or dark and stormy...rather speaks of sunlight glinting...strange don't cha consider BlBobby for a writing that speaks of Midnight...
The purple of the heather and the yellow blooming gorse, Sunlight glinting water on a Scottish loch, of course, And hiding there in camouflage, his coat a purple grey, A haggis waits so silently - the hunted and the prey.

## Post 28 by blbobby (Ooo you're gona like this!) on Sunday, 17-Dec-2006 10:52:17

That's good Grace, I'll have to go asearchin and see what I can find.
Bob