A Girl's Proposal for the Hands

(This is a repost from http://thereturnofthehands.wordpress.com/)

Last night Sharif and I watched the first half of Bram Stoker’s DRACULA with Gary Oldham, Keanu Reeves, and Winona Ryder.  I had never seen the movie before and also admitted to not having read the book.  It’s on my Kindle, as are a number of many other books I still need to get to.  Sharif was surprised by my admission and asked if I’ve read Frakenstein either.  I haven’t, but I do know the story behind its creation, being the Byron fan I’ve been for so long.  I know that it began on a rainy day in Italy, where the poets and philosophers – Byron, Mary and Percy Shelley – met with friends and babies’ mamas and out of boredom, decided to all write a monster story.  Byron’s Vampyre was tossed in the trash to be later resurrected and published by his physician friend and Mary Shelley’s was turned into FRANKENSTEIN: or The Modern Prometheus.

Anyway, we watched the oddity that was that movie for awhile until Master Chef had recorded long enough to watch without commercials and so we switched over.  It was too late and DRACULA too heavy of a movie for me to commit to on a school night.  But as I was getting ready for bed later that evening, a thought occurred to me.  Wouldn’t it be fun for us Hands to have a rainy day Lake Geneva moment?  If the four of us met in an imaginary lake house in the digital rainy Italian countryside of the Four Hands website and each offered up an original monster short story of our own.  We can set parameters – it must be SHORT, like maybe two pages or so and create a new sort of nightmare or night terror.  We each post on a different day.  We give ourselves time to write, what with writing and reading and life to attend to, and then we share our works with each other.  There would be no competition, just fun and creation and who knows, maybe the next Frankenstein will be raised on a silver lab table again.

Since this was posted on the Hands site, all three male hands agreed so expect some horror stories your way.  Now that I've made this agreement, I have to come up with a new "monster."  So far I've been writing random words and thoughts in a notebook.  This won't stop me from working on the fourth Arethane book, but will afford me a needed break, writing something else.  As Neil Gaiman said, even if you stop to work on something else, keep working, keep writing.  It all leads back.  So stay tuned.