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It was a mildly dark and sort of stormy night

Two Canadians met with international prize-winning glory this week — sort of. James Macdonald of Vancouver and Kevin Hogg of Cranbrook earned dishonourable mentions in San Jose State University’s annual Bulwer-Lytton contest, which honours truly terrible first sentences for proposed novels. Macdonald got the nod for this gem: “Mitzi’s wet T-shirt clung to her torso like paint on the nose of a jumbo jet.” And Hogg’s entry read as follows: “It was a dark and stormy night, although technically it wasn’t black or anything — more of a gravy colour like the spine for the 1969 Scribner’s Sons edition of A Farewell to Arms, and, truth be told, the storm didn’t sound any more fierce than the opening to Leon Russell’s 1975 classic, Back to the Island.” (The contest’s namesake, Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton, is famous for the opening line “It was a dark and stormy night” in his novel Paul Clifford.)

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