2006 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest winners announced

Jim Guigli of Carmichael, CA, is the winner with,

Detective Bart Lasiter was in his office studying the light from his one small window falling on his super burrito when the door swung ... [continued on site]

Category winners, runners-up and also-rans can also be found there.

The deadline each year is April 15th or some time thereafter. Cash prize. Fame.

What is the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest?

Since 1982 the English Department at San Jose State University has sponsored the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, a whimsical literary competition that challenges entrants to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels. The contest (hereafter referred to as the BLFC) was the brainchild (or Rosemary's baby) of Professor Scott Rice, whose graduate school excavations unearthed the source of the line "It was a dark and stormy night." Sentenced to write a seminar paper on a minor Victorian novelist, he chose the man with the funny hyphenated name, Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, who was best known for perpetrating The Last Days of Pompeii, Eugene Aram, Rienzi, The Caxtons, The Coming Race, and--not least--Paul Clifford, whose famous opener has been plagiarized repeatedly by the cartoon beagle Snoopy. No less impressively, Lytton coined phrases that have become common parlance in our language: "the pen is mightier than the sword," "the great unwashed," and "the almighty dollar" (the latter from The Coming Race, now available from the Broadview Press).