While approaching literary agents and publishers in the last couple of months, my memory drifted back to some old Peanuts cartoon strips.
I’m sure that we all recognise the situations below. Snoopy often begins his stories with the phrase ‘It was a dark and stormy night.’ This was coined by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who was an influential English novelist of the nineteenth century.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bulwer-Lytton
He also came up with the phrases ‘the great unwashed’, ’the pursuit of the almighty dollar’ and ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’.
He could wax lyrical as well, and as I get older turning into a silver wolf, I take comfort in his observation:
