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

Bulwer-Lytton Award Winners, 2008

so anyway, via Ace comes this year's Bulwer-Lytton Award winners. I love this kind of stuff. Anyone who's ever sat down at a typewriter / word processor / computer to write a work of fiction has reams of this kind of stuff laying around.

Having read a completely unhealthy amount of Chandler / Hammett / Spillane / etc. in my late formative years; and having watched almost as many film-noir classics as Lileks, I opted for detective fiction for my writing efforts. This year's Bulwer-Lytton winner for detective fiction was spot on:

Mike Hummer had been a private detective so long he could remember Preparation A, his hair reminded everyone of a rat who'd bitten into an electrical cord, but he could still run faster than greased owl snot when he was on a bad guy's trail, and they said his friskings were a lot like getting a vasectomy at Sears.

That's some inspired siht, right there. The runner-up is just as good, IMHO:

The hardened detective glanced at his rookie partner and mused that who ever had coined the term "white as a sheet" had never envisioned a bed accessorized with a set of Hazelnut, 500-count Egyptian cotton linens from Ralph Lauren complimented by matching shams and a duvet cover nor the dismembered body of its current occupant.

Maybe next year I'll enter some of my really, really bad "first lines". As a long-standing abuser of the English language, I should be a lock.

thatisall. I reserve the right to revise and extend, but will limit those rights to matters of spelling and coherence.