I have to admit to occasionally having difficulty understanding why the line “it was a dark and stormy night” is subject to such derision in literary circles. I mean, seriously: it doesn’t sound that bad. It almost sounds like something I might write. Oh…
Anyway, one thing I can understand is why the “winning” entries in the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction contest, 2005 edition, er…won. Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton, by the way, was the Victorian period writer who penned the “dark and stormy night” line.
One of my favorites in this year’s list follows…
“Wet leaves stuck to the spinning wagon wheels like feathers to a freshly tarred heretic, reminding those who watched them of the endless movement of the leafy earth-or so they would have, if only those fifteenth-century onlookers had believed that the earth actually rotated, which they didn’t, which is why it was heretical to say that it did-and which is the reason why the wagon held a freshly tarred heretic in the first place.”
Gotta love the imagery 😉