Shoreline man is a winner in the 2015 Bulwer-Lytton contest for bad writing

From the 2015 Bulwer-Lytton announcement

Conceived to honor the memory of Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton and to encourage unpublished authors who do not have the time to actually write books, the contest challenges entrants to compose bad opening sentences to imaginary novels.

Bulwer was selected as patron of the competition because he opened his novel "Paul Clifford" (1830) with the immortal words, "It was a dark and stormy night." Lytton’s sentence actually parodied the line and went on to make a real sentence of it, but he originated the line "The pen is mightier than the sword," and the expression "the great unwashed." His best known work is "The Last Day's of Pompeii" (1834), an historical novel that has been adapted for film multiple times.

As has happened every year since the contest went public in 1983, thousands of entries poured in not just from the United States and Canada but from such countries as England, Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, Germany, Japan, Ireland, and Indonesia.

Winners are selected in many categories, including Grand Panjandrum’s Special Award, Adventure, Crime/Detective, and Children's Literature. Each category has a winner, a runner-up, and a dishonorable mention.

Dan Leyde of Shoreline was the winner in Historical Fiction with this entry:

click to enlarge

Here's the website for those of you who might like to start writing for the 2016 contest.

The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest - Where “WWW” means “Wretched Writers Welcome”