A friend of mine who works in the magazine business invited a couple of dozen people on his e-mail list to submit their own version of the start of a truly bad novel.
Howard and I teamed up to concoct a truly awful beginning to a bad novel about international intrigue, lust--and powerlifting.
And........our submission WON !!
Most of our competition was people who actually write for a living. As far as I know, Howard is the only civilian who took part. So he is understandably proud of being declared an even worse writer than the worst of them.
Herewith, the most wretched prose you have read in years (she said, proudly):

My muscles ache and a hush falls on the grubby gym in Slovakia, as the surly giants from Hungary and Belarus slap six slabs of Japanese iron onto each side of the cold steel bar.....the bar that is smeared with the blood and the chalk of the boys who came before me, the little boys now gone, carried out on gurneys, wrapped in wet sheets.
The judge, a half-blind fool of a Frenchman gestures contemptuously for me, the only American left standing, to approach the bar. The hostile crowd watches. They watch and sneer, hoping that I will fail. I don't care. I never care. Their looks fall on deaf ears. For I fear no weight......but I do fear the Slavic thugs who swarmed over my coach, the lovely Bambette, like angry bees, pummeling her six feet of Swedish pulchritude into the ground as she entered this wretched gym, all lithe muscle and symmetry, her eyes flashing in contempt at the squat, thick-necked Russian lifters with hair on their backs and perky breasts.
Will the bar rise without the protective crystal blue eyes of Bambette to coach me, her firm but pliant butt cheeks perched on the edge of the folding chair in the front row as she leans forward to display the kind of cleavage that kept Hollywood in business all through the 1950's and kept me in business last night, three glorious times? But I digress.
Ah, the 1950's. They were a lonely time for a small boy on the potato farm in Wisconsin, his only toy a discarded truck axle that no man could deadlift. A mere lad with a drunk step-father who never let him play with the other children, coming home smelling of cheap liquor and cheaper women. No toys, no friends, no life except picking potatoes and picking up truck axles. How would that small boy know that one day the raw strength in the very being of his sinews, tendons, muscles, and guts would all coalesce into one massive effort to show the sneering crowd that red blooded Americans don't give up, we don't stop, we don't say we can't.
We deadlift like real men.
But without Bambette, my Scandinavian she woman? Bambette, who took me under her at the Oxford library when we took the course in Hegelian philosophy from Muenster, the sadist don who had been released from the torture chamber in East Berlin a mere 15 years earlier. I schooled Bambette in Hegel as she schooled me in the fine points of deadlifting. Showing me her mounds, her valleys, her depths, her erectors, as she bent over to grab my thick weighted bar. Knowing that I would one day be on this platform to attempt the impossible.
The clock ticks on as the half blind French fool alternately squints at his stopwatch and at me while the crowd sneers a squint at me as I squint for Bambette........