"It was a dark and stormy night..."

So begins the novel Paul Clifford by Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton.  As most of you probably know, this line is used by Snoopy as he hunches over his typewriter (typewriter? What's that??) writing his great Beagle novel.  The opening sentence has also come to signify... ummm... let's just say, not very good writing.

There's even a contest called the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest where entrants submit an opening sentence to a non-existent novel.  The winner for 2008?  Here it is, in all its... glory.

"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.'"

I love it.  I just wish the author would have written the rest of the novel!