It Was a Dark & Stormy Night: The Final Conflict compiled by Scott Rice, 1992.

This book is actually a fairly recent acquisition of mine, but it's fascinating, not so much for what it contains but what it's part of.  Basically, this book, which is part of a series, contains the winning entries/best entries from the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.  I had never heard of this contest until I found this book for 50 cents.  (I know the tag says it was $1.00, but if you go to the VNSA Book Sale on Sunday, the books are half off.  This is a large part of the reason why my book collection is so big.)

The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest appeals to me not just because I like writing but because the aim of this contest is to write badly.  Specifically, you have to pretend that you are writing the first sentence to a very badly-written book, and the winner is the worst one.  There are quite a lot of contenders, which is how they are able to publish books full of past entries.  The namesake of the contest is Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, who has sometimes been credited with originating the hackneyed opening line "It was a dark and stormy night ..." (although that expression had actually been around before Bulwer-Lytton used it).  This line was the inspiration for the contest and is part of the title of each compilation of past entries.

Naturally, when I discovered the existence of this contest, I sent in about half a dozen entries myself.  I won't tell you what they were because this year's contest is still being judged.  I've often thought that worrying about the quality of my writing has kept me from writing as freely as I'd like, but writing to be intentionally bad has its own challenges.  Is it possible to have a sentence that is well-crafted to be especially bad?  After a fashion, I think it is.  I don't know what my chances of winning the contest are, but I tried as awfully hard as I could to be terrible.

If you would like to see some past entries from the contest, you don't have to buy one of the books; there are past winning entries listed directly on the contest website.  (The website mentions that the book collections are out of print, but it has a link to places to buy used copies, if you would like to have your own.)

There are so many gems, it's difficult to pick just one favorite from the past entries, but one entry that I liked from the book I own is:

"As Maria walked along the beach, the clouds grew angry, the sea raged, the wind howled, and the sand was just plain irritated."
-- Jeff Kruse, Van Nuys, California