It's deja vu! All over again!

Longtime followers of this column know that every October, we get all crazy over here at the D-news and invite our readers to submit a howling bad opening sentence to the Worst Novel Never Written.

Our contest is based on the notorious Bulwer-Lytton contest (www.bulwer-lytton.com) created by Professor Scott Rice of San Jose State University in memory of prolific Victorian novelist Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, who first penned that infamous Mother-of-All-Opening-Line-Cliches: "It was a dark and stormy night …"

Your assignment is to write something that rivals anything written by Bulwer-Lytton himself.

Wes Larsen won our contest last year with this little gem: "She was hotter than a fresh bucket of roofing oil on the eighth of July but much less likely to prevent further damage."

Way to go, Wes!

This year's winners of the national contest also make for happy reading.

Eric Rice of Wisconsin, for example, totally brings it with this sentence:

"She walked into my office on legs as long as one of those long-legged birds that you see in Florida — the pink ones, not the white ones — except that she was standing on both of them, not just one of them, like those birds, the pink ones, and she wasn't wearing pink, but I knew right away that she was trouble, which those birds usually aren't."

And since (apparently) we are on the subject of dangerous broads, how about this sentence from Harol Hoffman-Meisner of North Carolina:

"The first time I saw her she took my breath away with her long blond hair that flowed over her shoulders like cheese sauce on a bed of nachos, making my stomach grumble as she stepped into the room, her red knit dress locking in curves better than a Ferrari at a Grand Prix."

Feeling inspired yet?

OK, then, here are the rules:

1. Your sentence must be original.

2. Your sentence must be just that — a sentence. The judicious use of semi-colons and colons is fine, of course, but there should just one period.

(A word of caution: Long, long sentences can be overwhelming to our judges.)

3. You may submit more than one sentence.

4. Your sentence can be rooted in any genre: romance, horror, children's fiction, mystery, western, historical, sci-fi or fantasy.

And speaking of fantasy, don't forget our special "Talking Unicorn" category. Far be it from me to disappoint my little unicorn-loving friend Anne Holman.

5. Also, don't forget our "Dark and Stormy" category.

6. Your entry/entries must be received by Thursday, Oct. 15.

E-mail them to me or send by snail mail in care of this paper at Deseret News, 30 E. 100 South, Salt Lake City, UT 84110.

If our judges like your sentence, we will print it and also your name in the paper. I wish we could offer you a book deal and your own reality TV show, but until we win the lottery, you'll have to accept our deepest admiration instead.

So here's to Edward!

And here's to our readers.

Now get busy.

e-mail: acannon@desnews.com