Holiday cheer!

Well, technically, it doesn't have anything to do with the holidays, but the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest will cheer you up! It's a "literary competition that challenges entrants to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels." There's a variety of categories, including Westerns, Romance, and Science Fiction. Here's one small sample - the Grand Prize Winner from 2004: "She resolved to end the love affair with Ramon tonight . . . summarily, like Martha Stewart ripping the sand vein out of a shrimp's tail . . . though the term "love affair" now struck her as a ridiculous euphemism . . . not unlike "sand vein," which is after all an intestine, not a vein . . . and that tarry substance inside certainly isn't sand . . . and that brought her back to Ramon."