The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest

I've written about good bad fiction before but that wasn't the real deal. Well, The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is. Sponsored by the English Department at San Jose State University and named for Edward George Bulwer-Lytton (who graced literature with the phrases "the pen is mightier than the sword," "the great unwashed," and "the almighty dollar" in addition to the perennial favorite opening line, "It was a dark and stormy night...") the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is

a whimsical literary competition that challenges entrants to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels.

You can read all of the 2006 winners here, but as a teaser, here is the overall winner:

Detective Bart Lasiter was in his office studying the light from his one small window falling on his super burrito when the door swung open to reveal a woman whose body said you've had your last burrito for a while, whose face said angels did exist, and whose eyes said she could make you dig your own grave and lick the shovel clean.

and the winner in the Romance category:

Despite the vast differences it their ages, ethnicity, and religious upbringing, the sexual chemistry between Roberto and Heather was the most amazing he had ever experienced; and for the entirety of the Labor Day weekend they had sex like monkeys on espresso, not those monkeys in the zoo that fling their feces at you, but more like the monkeys in the wild that have those giant red butts, and access to an espresso machine.

There are about a hundred more of these "winners", so go check them out.