Well, I was mistaken about Poetry.com, but I think I have found a legitimate contest this time! There was a Reuters news article about it.

Here is the website:
http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/

"Since 1982 the English Department at San Jose State University has sponsored the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, a whimsical literary competition that challenges entrants to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels...The contest...was the brainchild...of Professor Scott Rice, whose graduate school excavations unearthed the source of the line "It was a dark and stormy night...[which] has been plagiarized repeatedly by the cartoon beagle Snoopy."

Contest Rules:

"The rules to the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest are childishly simple:

Each entry must consist of a single sentence but you may submit as many entries as you wish.

Sentences may be of any length (though you go beyond 50 or 60 words at your peril), and entries must be "original" (as it were) and previously unpublished.

Surface mail entries should be submitted on index cards, the sentence on one side and the entrant's name, address, and phone number on the other.

Email entries should be in the body of the message, NOT in an attachment. If you are submitting multiple entries, please include them in one message.

Entries will be judged by categories, from "general" to detective, western, science fiction, romance, and so on.

There will be overall winners as well as category winners.

The official deadline is April 15 (a date that Americans associate with painful submissions and making up bad stories). The actual deadline may be as late as June 30.

Wild Card Rule: Resist the temptation to work with puns like "It was a stark and dormy night."

Send your entries to:

Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest
Department of English
San Jose State University
San Jose, CA 95192-0090"

We have almost a year to come up with some winners!

BoomBoom