It was a dark and stormy night...

10/22/2007 12:06 PM EDT

Do you remember the Peanuts cartoons in which Snoopy was trying to write a novel that always began: "It was a dark and stormy night..."? In fact, this came from the first sentence of an 1830 novel called "Paul Clifford" by English novelist, poet, playwright, and politician Edward Bulwer-Lytton:

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.

Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873) was a popular writer in his day, coining such phrases as "the great unwashed", "pursuit of the almighty dollar", and "the pen is mightier than the sword". However, he may well have fallen into obscurity along with so many of his contemporaries if it were not for the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest sponsored by the English Department of San Jose State University.

"It was a dark and stormy night. . . " is now generally understood to represent an extravagantly florid style with redundancies and run-on sentences, and the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest was formed to "celebrate" the worst extremes of this general style of writing.

Over the years the contest has gained international attention and now attracts 10,000 or more entries a year. Three winning examples are as follows:

2005: Dan McKay: "As he stared at her ample bosom, he daydreamed of the dual Stromberg carburetors in his vintage Triumph Spitfire, highly functional yet pleasingly formed, perched prominently on top of the intake manifold, aching for experienced hands, the small knurled caps of the oil dampeners begging to be inspected and adjusted as described in chapter seven of the shop manual."

2006: Jim Guigli: "Detective Bart Lasiter was in his office studying the light from his one small window falling on his super burrito when the door swung open to reveal a woman whose body said you've had your last burrito for a while, whose face said angels did exist, and whose eyes said she could make you dig your own grave and lick the shovel clean."

2007: Jim Gleeson: "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."

I love this stuff. In fact, I just discovered that five books collecting the "best" BLFC entries have been published over the years as follows:

• It Was a Dark and Stormy Night (1984)
  ISBN 0-14-007556-9 
   
• Son of "It Was a Dark and Stormy Night" (1986)
  ISBN 0-14-008839-3 
   
• Bride of Dark and Stormy (1988)
  ISBN 0-14-010304-X 
   
• It Was a Dark & Stormy Night: The Final Conflict (1992)
  ISBN 0-14-015791-3 
   
• Dark and Stormy Rides Again (1996)
  ISBN 0-14-025490-0

There's also an "It Was a Dark and Stormy Night" Audio cassette (ISBN 1-57270-045-9). I just visited Amazon.com to find that a few copies are still available via secondhand stores. Of course I immediately ordered one (a bargain at only $2.50, but you have to get there fast before the cheap copies run out), and I then waited for confirmation that it was on its way before penning this blog, because I didn't want to take any chances of losing the little rascal.

Furthermore, I just discovered that Bulwer-Lytton's original Paul Clifford novel is still available from Amazon.com. I think I'll add that to this year's "Christmas Present List".

Questions? Comments? Feel free to email me – Clive "Max" Maxfield – at max@techbites.com). And, of course, if you haven't already done so, don't forget to Sign Up for our weekly Programmable Logic DesignLine Newsletter.