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?"