Had a really nice Georgia Nutts Guild meeting today; a new face was in the house and all the exercises were really well written.
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Here ismy exercise from today's meeting.  Only three paragraphs, I know, but hey, it's a quicker read, right?  If you like it, chime in here or on my facebook page and tell me what you think happens next.

It was Harold’s blood, redder than an apple, that fled across the hardwood floor, leaving his body in a great exodus; not the parting of the Red Sea, but the spilling of it.  His chest heaved in a thrashing motion, wild and unsteady, the beating drum of his heart losing its rhythm in the desperation for survival.  This was a futile conceit; the question of survival had already been answered, resoundingly in the negative.  His body kept acting out the strange and stupid impulse to prop up onto his arms, as though he might just get up, but his trembling shoulders wouldn’t hold him firm and his elbows kept slipping in the blood.  The pool around him crept out along the lines of the wood floor, spreading like a flood seen from above.  Not so far away, the edge of the crimson puddle met the fringe of a Persian rug, its fluid body infiltrating the worn fibers, thread by thread.  Harold had not noticed the rug, now sopping up his life blood, nor would he.  Neither would he raise his head to stare disbelieving at the wound in his side; he had done that already, suffered the shock of it, doubted foolishly the obvious and telling finality it indicated.  Now, with few precious moments left on earth, it was the one memory he would never escape. 

He craned his neck backward, rolling his head sideways, trying to catch sight of Veronica.  The floor stretched away in his field of vision like the sands of a desert, from here to the horizon.  Among the legs of chairs and a table, now like towers in his sight, he could not find here.  Seeming miles away, the deep shadow lingering under the sofa peeled back just enough to expose a colorful plastic children’s toy.  Perhaps, shocked by the carnage, it had holed itself up under the sofa seeking a harbor in which to process its own terror.  Perhaps this is just a personification, using the allusion of an unliving object to foreshadow the fate of the other character in the room, whom would soon enough join it in the world of the inanimate.

“Veronica,”  Harold gagged, through a spurt of blood.  She was nowhere to be found.  The great ragged hole in his side, created by a shotgun, twitched with the effort to produce any audible sound.  His breath, raspy and feeble, sloughed out of his throat like old rags being torn to strips.  He closed his eyes against the pain.  Where his daughter could be was the only object worth holding in his attention.  Footsteps, heavy and deliberate came thumping softly through the ceiling from the floor above.  Harold’s mind struggled to assemble an image of what could be happening, or about to happen up there.

Georgia Nutts Guild exercise for 04.02.16: Word mapping

So, mapping out words associated with the keyword, "Saline" produced the source for this paragraph:

    Dry eyes blinked outward, again and again, seeking to fend off the inward push of morning in the desert.  The air was crisp and arid like old paper; the sun, already blazing even from its low station close to the horizon.  Anywhere else on earth, this would be a midsummer's midday, not the early stretch just after dawn.  The breeze, as it fled, still carried with it a trace of the nightly chill bestowed to these barren sands but that was rapidly disappearing along with the encroachment of the heat of the day.  "Get the hell out of Dodge," he thought silently, blinking again.  Where he had heard it, he couldn't quite remember.  Then, almost as a kind of ritual, he mumbled it again out loud, just enough for himself to hear, not that there was anyone within a hundred miles to overhear it anyway.  "Get the hell out of Dodge."  It slid out with a certain slimy, scaly menace and he instantly regretted having said it openly.  He turned his back on the sun, his shadow drawing out from his feet to an outlandish length along the glowing ripples of sand.  "Where am I?" he wondered, "Arizona?" He stared down the length of his shadow towards the western horizon.  "Is Dodge in Arizona?" he queried idly, somehow finding it an unlikely possibility.  A ball of tumbleweed blew past in the retreating breeze, bouncing along the tiny dunes of the could-be-Arizona desert.  It seemed, in its lazy lope forward, to have more direction and purpose than himself, which he accepted with a slight sense of chagrin.  He sucked his teeth and kicked up a small cloud of dust with his left shoe.  "Hmm," he thought, staring down at his foot.  It still held the guilty residue of dust left from kicking the sand.  It was a sneaker he was wearing.  Not necessarily the first choice for trodding along on a trip in the desert.   He also noticed, now with additional chagrin that his two shoes were mismatched.  The left foot was wearing what looked like a cross-trainer, charcoal grey and orange, the right foot was clad in an old-school canvas Converse, flat-foot style and off-white.  He sucked his teeth again, rolling his tongue around inside his mouth.  Gazing westbound, he could see a line of low slung mountains gracing the distant edge of the earth, purple at their feet, their crests just beginning to take on the fiery glow of the sun's rays.  "What lies beyond those hills", he pondered.  Maybe Las Vegas, or even Los Angeles.  Well, he couldn't stand out here forever, that much was certain; he would have to pick a direction and get to stepping, mismatched shoes and all.  No highway or any man made artifacts were obvious anywhere in sight.  He sighed, turning again to look eastward toward the ascending solar disk.  It was already making his face and body hot.  He sighed, twice.  "Okay", he questioned, not sure if he could provide himself any suitable answer, "Which way?"

    It was recently, that while walking in a secluded place, forested and rich, I stepped suddenly into a spot of undetected deep shadow.  So jarring was the transition from light to dark, it was like waking in the middle of the night with no recollection of having fallen asleep during the afternoon, and it froze me in my tracks.  I stood, stone-rigid and feeling nothing, my balance reined tightly by an invisible tether; the soles of my shoes would not rustle so much as a single pine needle underfoot.  Even my breath, having been arrested, lingered inside my chest until the needs of my body forced me to silently release it, metering it slowly through my teeth, held lax.  I peered the length of my nose, seeing beyond the tip of it the deep well of shadow in which I stood and only inches beyond that, the well lighted forest floor ahead, strewn with the detritus of many seasons.  I was endeavoring to see the pale cloud of my breath, contrasted white and gossamer against the brief black space around me, but there was no aspiring mist; it was not even yet autumn.  Somehow, though, an impenetrable cloak of chill had wrapped around me; the shadow seemed to encroach fully onto my skin, and in the summer's dry air, I was damp with the feel of it. 
    A sparkling tension writhed within my frozen nerves, leaking anticipation like hormones into my veins and I felt my eyes were too large.  Is this, I wondered, how the deer feels, when it has heard the footfalls of the wolf but has not yet seen the beast?  Is this the last moment before panic a rodent feels when the raptor's talons have not yet struck but he knows in his guts something has gone unavoidably wrong?  Following the natural order of my breath, obviously the wisest part of me, I collected my reason and began to look around.  At first it was a struggle; a vague, nameless fear had settled in my neck, granting it an abnormal recalcitrance.  Even my eyes suffered a tiring resistance to the most basic call to motion, so I pushed back and forth, warming myself like clay.  As I slid my head side to side, and eventually higher and lower, I gazed about in all directions, but could not for the life of me find the source of the shadow.  No tree stood any closer or broader than any other, and in the boughs above, the sun came piercing through the canopy like shimmering swords.  While I stood in the midst of a shadow like coal dust collected in a chimney, the abundant life all around me bathed in the late summer midday sun.  Meanwhile, I could feel the cold etching like the points of frozen needles on the surfaces of my bones. 
    As the moment drew longer, the terror gave way to a bristling lucidity, an inundation of the surrounding world into my senses.  And though other impressions were more immediate, it began fully with the smell of the forest.  The earthy scent of humus, that life blood of all things arboreal, heavy with the fuel of that emerald fire, flooded into my nostrils.  I could then hear the varied calls of creatures small and smaller, crying out among the sheltered eaves.  The scrabbling of a myriad bodies filled the air, their wings, feet and claws churning among the leaves both living and discarded.  Predators of many sizes lurked in the cradles of the roots and limbs, unseen by their prey, but I could feel the electricity of their quickening impulse to act, each and every one.  Earth's Four Winds meandered the unmarked labyrinthine paths among the trees, but at every turn, I could detect them on my skin, like ripples on a lake.  My vision was overwhelmed by the dancing verdant wash of a billion leaves drenched in sunlight, the angular edges of limb and trunk punctuating the canvas in high contrast, the dazzling rusty dun of the forest floor etched, needle by needle in flawless clarity.  And yet, within this synaesthetic rush, I was absconded within a bubble of black, shivering in interminable shadow.  Mere feet away, a step or only two, the world was ribald and splendid, while I was lost in a moment, a timid tree dweller waiting to feel the puncturing grip of a falcon.  Though I did not move at all, not a muscle, I somehow stooped in the cold, the posture of the frigid and forgotten.
    Ahead, by only a short measure, where the cool woods opened into a wide dale, I could see the dander and fluff of a wind blown world, basking in the glorious midday, halcyon and pure.  Beneath me, my feet loitered in the black, skewed and oddly set, like a sad boy's feet.  They were only slightly eclipsed by the sight of my own hand, enveloped in the shadow appearing morbidly pale, even embalmed.  I looked up, against the weight of my own head like a massive stone, staring ahead at the promised world beyond the trees.  Dandelion feathers like faeries frolicked white against a crystalline sky.  My heart clenched, aching and terrified, beguiled by an unanswered question:  a cold sweat slid down my skin as I wondered sickly; Why Had I Not Yet Stepped Forward?

Gettin' noisy, yet?

Just finished the updates to the Georgia Nutts and Patrick Bates, Ink sites.  The simple things always demand the most.  Although I really can't complain; DAP Tales has provided so much good design work to keep things functional yet uncomplicated.  Navigation should be a breeze for everyone.  Since I am the web designer on deck right now, please feel free to chime in here or by my email at alfalaqart@gmail.com to let me know if something on the site isn't working or could just be easier or you to use.
Check it out for yourself right here:  www.readgeorgianutts.com

Here at aethernetxfer, I shall endeavor, as ever I have, to leave the window open, breathe in the cool, dark air of the post-day, and take a dive into the Higgs field lurking beneath the colliding atoms of my thoughts, plumbing its depths, so close to Kelvin Zero.  My body and mind dissolved by the crackling fusion of its quantum warp and woof, my soul, remaining alone, may find sympathy in its resonance and I may, through the tendrils of perception come to see the world, endlessly growing and thriving around me, its molecules and kilojoules neither fair nor unfair.  Join me if you wish; we may experience together the gateless gate that opens always to the flow of the AETHERNETXFER.

And bear  in mind this simple aphorism, spoken by a cartoon panda, but worthy of Master Foyan himself:  "There is no secret ingredient; it's just you."

Bring in the noise, alFalaq!