It's Bulwer-Lytton Time Again

The winners of the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest were released for today's news cycle -- coincidentally as I'd just finished reading the 1982-2005 winners in a book of random stuff last night.

As usual, there is a grand prize winner, some runners-up, and individual category winners. The contest, for those of you who haven't heard of it before, is to create the horrible opening sentence to an imaginary novel, and its name (dis)honors the once-popular Victorian writer Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton, author of the infamous "It was a dark and stormy night."

This year's winner was:

Theirs was a New York love, a checkered taxi ride burning rubber, and like the city their passion was open 24/7, steam rising from their bodies like slick streets exhaling warm, moist, white breath through manhole covers stamped "Forged by DeLaney Bros., Piscataway, N.J."

The website has many, many more entries from this year, including this winner in the Romance category:

Bill swore the affair had ended, but Louise knew he was lying, after discovering Tupperware containers under the seat of his car, which were not the off-brand containers that she bought to save money, but authentic, burpable, lidded Tupperware; and she knew he would see that woman again, because unlike the flimsy, fake containers that should always be recycled responsibly, real Tupperware must be returned to its rightful owner.

(After reading the past winners, I was feeling inspired and thinking about entering myself -- though I now see that I have quite some time to hone an entry for the next year's competition.)