A shambling sentence about screaming seafarers on the sturdy whaler Ellie May stood shoulders above the rest in an annual bad writing contest.

David McKenzie, 55, of Federal Way, Wash., won the grand prize in San Jose State University's annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest with this:

"Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin' off Nantucket Sound from the nor' east and the dogs are howlin' for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the Ellie May, a sturdy whaler Captained by John McTavish; for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin' and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests."

McKenzie was a previous winner in the notorious competition's western and children's literature categories.

The annual contest, a parody of prose, invites entrants to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels. It is named after Victorian writer Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton, who opened his 1830 novel Paul Clifford, with the much-quoted, "It was a dark and stormy night ..."

Among other winners announced Monday were:

• "How best to pluck the exquisite Toothpick of Ramses from between a pair of acrimonious vipers before the demonic Guards of Nicobar returned should have held Indy's full attention, but in the back of his mind he still wondered why all the others who had agreed to take part in his wife's holiday scavenger hunt had been assigned to find stuff like a Phillips screwdriver or blue masking tape," from Joe Wyatt of Amarillo, Texas, winner in the adventure category.
• "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," from Eric Rice of Sun Prairie, Wis., winner in the detective category.
• "Oliver Smith, spy on Her Majesty's service — not that she knew about it, because that tended to spoil the whole secrecy thing and really, who'd want an un-secret spy, anyway? Not to mention that any spy worth his salt would kill anybody who knew his identity… so I wouldn't go around mentioning that I read this if I were you — looked both ways before crossing the street," from Rafaela Canetti of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, winner in the spy fiction category.

Other contest categories include fantasy, romance, science fiction, purple prose and vile puns.

Though most winning and second-place submissions originated from the U.S., entries also came from other countries, including the U.K., France, Australia and Canada. Joseph Aspler of Kirkland, Que., was the runner-up in the historical fiction category for the following:

"On a fine summer morning during the days of the Puritans, the prison door in the small New England town of B----n opened to release a convicted adulteress, the Scarlet Letter A embroidered on her dress, along with the Scarlet Letters B through J, a veritable McGuffey's Reader of Scarlet Letters, one for each little tyke waiting for her at the gate."