Somewhere, an English teacher is crying

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Jim Guigli writes the kind of stories that you simply can't not put down.
Here's how he started one recent attempt: "Detective Bart Lasiter was in his office studying the light from his one small window falling on his super burrito when the door swung open to reveal a woman whose body said you've had your last burrito for a while, whose face said angels did exist, and whose eyes said she could make you dig your own grave and lick the shovel clean," Guigli wrote.
That piece of prose won Guigli, a retired mechanical designer, the San Jose State University's annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for bad writing.
"The judges were impressed by his appalling powers of invention," said Scott Rice, an English and comparative literature professor, who has organized the bad writing contest since its inception in 1982.
"At one time I thought I wanted to write detective novels," Guigli told the Associated Press on Monday. "I never got a good start on it."
The contest is named for Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, whose 1830 novel "Paul Clifford" began with the oft-mocked, "It was a dark and stormy night."