From: "snip, snap, ZAAP!" To: "ricochet writing!" Subject: EXERCISE: Ancient, It Waits... -------- [WARNING! MAY IRRITATE NIGHTMARES AND OTHER TERRORS OF THE NIGHT! if we're lucky...] [ohoh! shiver, shake, and don't blink, here it comes...] Start with this sentence: What waited there was powerful and hungry and alive, alive, wild and fierce and old and strange-- [taken from p. 32 of Wild Blood by Anne Logston. For some reason, this sentence jumped out at me and said WRITE!...] Go on from there. Let that fear in your fingers out. Let the sweat stand cold on the back of your neck. Let the heart rate jump...and slowly stop. Yes, fiends and scabblers, let us wiggle, let us waggle, let us feel those hooks sinking deeper and deeper into racial pits of unsleeping dread... deeper... deeper... scraping and straining into the depths... until... SCREAMS erupt as a paw slaps down on our shoulder... breath stops as the dark rises over our heads... and ears strain to hear as blood bubbles out of throats trying to give their final warning a half-second after the claws ripped across them... [eeeh! I'm going to hide under the covers.] tink