We used to play this game, my nerdy bookish friends and I, where we'd write a novel collectively, usually at a gathering that involved candles and wine and perhaps pot. Sometimes it was a story-telling format, all of us cross-legged facing the center of someone's parents' livingroom; sometimes it was in a faded notebook passed from hand to hand, paragraph by paragraph. Later, it mutated to the internet and lost that sense of gently getting drunk together off of ridiculous words.

Lately I'm staring to feel it again though, through the novelistic spam that arrives in my inbox. The short preview glimpse of the email often makes me want to read more. It tugs at my attention, distracts me from the business of the day, such as this one I got a few minutes ago: "Curse that Selmi, he has made mecatch cold! Now, with death,he would surmount them all.
He looked at his hands, his legs, and at oncefelt a thrill of horror."

It goes on:

Why, why had they been gathered up like thattogether?
Henceforward, he wasraised above everyone and everything.
Now Donna Caterina will die of a brokenheart. His hand strayed restlessly in his pocket.
And his fatherdied here, in my arms, at Milazzo.