It's January again, so I want to revisit a prompt from last January that I had a ton of fun with: Lyttle Lytton Week! Let's see what you guys can come up with using really bad first sentences.

If you're not familiar with it, the Lyttle Lytton is an annual contest to compose terrible opening sentences for imaginary novels. Your challenge this week is to use one of these sentences, verbatim, as the first sentence of your story, then write a good story with it.

To break it down into bullet points:

1. When you sign up, choose a Lyttle Lytton sentence from the archive link above, or ask me to choose one for you. The only restriction I'm going to put on this is please don't choose one based on topical politics, because I don't want to read what comes from that. (Erotic or fanfictional choices are also bad, but I'll let you brave those if you want.)

2. Your sentence should be used, verbatim, as the first sentence of your story. This should be the real first sentence; don't get cute with it by having it be from a bad novel being written by your protagonist, or something. Own it.

3. You don't have to exactly copy the style or content of your sentence, because that would probably lead to a bad story, and I want you to write well.

No erotica, fanfic, topical political satire/screeds, archive-breaking formatting, or dick pics. Other standard TD rules apply.