Well, I slept for about 11 hours last night. Got up and had lunch and coffee with Daniel, and we had this rather odd rambling conversation on the history of culture, from which we drew the rather surprising conclusion that when nations have strong shipbuilding industries, they also have excellent painters, whereas theatrical comedy has a surprising tendency to flourish under strong monarchs.

I think it's all historical coincidence, but I suppose it might have something to do with the availability of cheap canvas.

Anyway, I came back and read both the stories for tomorrow's writers group meeting, and critted one of them. I wrote about half of a letter for the letter game that I'm playing with Marissa, and made a pot of chai. I'm sitting here drinking chai and posting this entry, and when I'm done, I'll probably go finish the letter.

It's days like this that make one conclude that life is pretty damn good.

The letter game is kind of funny. It's really hard to do it without slipping into that strange old-fashioned epistolary voice. I had toyed with the idea of starting a science fictional letter game - a near future epistolary story told in e-mail, or something - but the damn thing kept insisting on starting itself with, "Dearest Cousin-" Nobody starts an e-mail with "Dearest Cousin", so I just decided to go with the old-fashioned feel, and just tweak the milieu a bit off the British upper class one that seems also to come default with most epistolary novels.

Though, I'm a bit afraid that I may have set us both up for having to do some actual research as the story progresses. Never mind. I'm having fun, and I hope Marissa is as well.

My favorite epistolary novel is Les Liaisons
Dangereuses (Dangerous Liaisons) by the euphoniously named Choderlos de Laclos. (I am amused to see that M. de Laclos has an IMDB page, with a quite substantial list of writing credits. All of which seem to be for various filmed versions of Dangerous Liaisons. There's even a Japanese version. Pretty cool. How many dead French writers have nine films to their credit?

Well, okay. Alexandre Dumas, père leaves M. de Laclos in the dust, with 130 different writing credits on IMDB. Dumas, fils gets 42 credits. Gustave Flaubert has 21. And even Abbé Prévost, author of the crashingly dull Manon Lescaut can claim 12 credits to his name. (Short version of Manon Lescaut for those who were never exposed to this, ahem, gem of French literature: I met this chick. She was, like, really hot. She lied to me, cheated on me, and used me in some weird scam, but I loved her anyway, because she was, like, really hot. She got deported to America because she was such a skank, and I went with her. Lots of bad stuff happened, and it all came to a tragic end and I never did get the girl. Did I mention that she was, like, really hot?)

Google tells me that de Laclos wrote another novel, entitled Ernestine. I wonder if it's worth reading? Nobody seems to have thought it worth filming, but that may well be another matter.