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It was a dark and stormy night, and people across the country were desperately trying to write the worst opening sentence for a novel to win the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. Here's what the winner, David McKenzie, 55, came up with:

"Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin' off Nantucket Sound from the nor' east and the dogs are howlin' for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the "Ellie May," a sturdy whaler Captained by John McTavish; for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin' and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests."

Read more about the Bulwer-Lytton wretched-writing contest after the jump.

The contest, which began at San Jose State University in 1982, challenges contestants to write the worst possible opening line. The end results, as bad-writing contests tend to be, are hilarious.

Who inspired this literary throwdown? Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton, the novelist and author of the recollection "It was a dark and stormy night" that inspired Snoopy to begin many of his works with the same phrase. The Nineteenth-century writer Bulwer-Lytton also coined chestnuts such as "the almighty dollar" and "the pen is mightier than the sword."

In addition to lame bragging rights, the contest winner also receives, in the words of the Web site, "a pittance."

Perhaps the runner-up deserves a kick in the pants for conceiving a run-on like this: "The wind dry-shaved the cracked earth like a dull razor -- the double edge kind from the plastic bag that you shouldn't use more than twice, but you do; but Trevor Earp had to face it as he started the second morning of his hopeless search for Drover, the Irish Wolfhound he had found as a pup near death from a fight with a prairie dog and nursed back to health, stolen by a traveling circus so that the monkey would have something to ride."

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