Date: 06/30/2010

San Jose State's grand tradition of recognizing the world's worst writers continued Tuesday with the announcement of the 2010 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest winner. Molly Ringle, a published author living in Seattle, crafted this year's top entry leaving disturbing mental images of gerbils and kissing in readers' minds forever:

"For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity's affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss--a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity's mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world's thirstiest gerbil."

Since 1982 the Bulwer-Lytton contest has challenged writers around the world to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels.

"It sort of makes fun of writers who try too hard to be clever or original," said retired SJSU English professor and contest founder Scott Rice in a recent interview with the San Jose Mercury News. Rice named the contest after Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, the Victorian writer who began his 1830 novel Paul Clifford with the now infamous words, "It was a dark and stormy night."

In the past, news organizations across the nation and globe have announced the winners, including ABC, NBC, NPR, The New York Times, Seattle Weekly, BBC, The Guardian and several radio stations in Australia, New Zealand and Austria.

Read this year's winning and runner-up contestant entries.

Read more about the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest in Washington Square magazine.