Well, the 2007 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest winners are out. Make that bad fiction. The annual contest judges submissions for the best opening sentence "to the worst of all possible novels." Here’s the overall winning entry:

Gerald began–but was interrupted by a piercing whistle which cost him ten percent of his hearing permanently, as it did everyone else in a ten-mile radius of the eruption, not that it mattered much because for them "permanently" meant the next ten minutes or so until buried by searing lava or suffocated by choking ash–to pee.

Jim Gleeson
Madison, Wisconsin

My personal favorite is the winner in the Children’s Literature category:

Danny, the little Grizzly cub, frolicked in the tall grass on this sunny Spring morning, his mother keeping a watchful eye as she chewed on a piece of a hiker they had encountered the day before.

Dave McKenzie
Federal Way, WA

See the entire list of winning entries here: http://www.sjsu.edu/depts/english/2007.htm

Stumble it!