bulwer lytton

enid's mission this fine and funny monday was to plumb the true depths of her lack of creative talent and invent a terrible opening sentence to a novel. what's so different to her usual postings, you're wondering. well, the difference is that this time it's a kind of competition, inspired by the humungously bad opening line of edward george bulwer-lytton's novel, paul clifford:

"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents--except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."

here are enid's own rather poor attempts to do worse:

Smoking a last cigarette, the train swept thunderously past me into the station and, tossing my mane of red-gold curls so that the sun glinted on them enticingly, I wondered if Dante Birk-Polsworthy, the love of my life, whom I'd met only three months before outside the ladie's toilets in “The Frog and Bottle” in Islington, when he pushed past me mistakenly thinking it was the gents', would at last disembark and swallow me up into his manly embrace, like soft, white, doughy bread around the sausage in a hotdog?

“I've killed two birds with one stone!!!” he ejaculated with pride, but she knew he was talking arrant nonsense, because it couldn't possibly be possible to inject enough momentum into a stone to enable it to pass through the first bird and into the second, even if the first bird was a bird of diminutive size, such as a wren or a sparrow.


go over to min at mamadrama and have a hoot browsing the other entries.