Why it frightened her:

It had been almost two years since she had dropped out of a favorite listserv, allfaiths.com. It had been such a time waster! Shortly before dropping off, she'd been involved a round-robbin writing thread. The story line, as is true of all round-robbins, where one person writes a scene based on the previous entry, had become wild. It was an old-west meets New York City fantasy with everything from robots to vampires centered on an old country house. City slickers trying to imagine old tractors and farm dogs made it extra wild. Each character had a favorite comfort from hot tea to Jim Beam Whiskey. Among those who played in the round-robin was a character by the name of Dingo. He came complete with straw hat and baggy coveralls. It was all in good fun and some terribly fun ideas had been birthed by the group. Overall, the quality of the writing was amazing.

One day, Katie mentioned shooting a manuscript off to a publisher. It was simply a figure of speech. Before she knew it, Dingo was playing with the idea in all sorts of terrible ways. "Katie git yer gun," or "Katie's cleanin' up her gun," "Katie's on a rampage! Better find that gun o' hers before she gets here or we'll all be dead!" or "We're gonna have to run, Katie's got 'er gun!" It had gotten out of hand and it made her miserable. Dingo was stuck on the idea and no matter what, he wasn't leaving it alone. She quit the thread and quit the list serv.

Just about a month before the firs of the threatening emails came, she'd started visiting the list serv again. Almost the day she returned, she had said something in a discussion on the subject of the war in Iraq and Dingo had become irate. He wasn't the least bit subtle about it, either. He was cold. Katie thought the post had been quite inoffensive, really, and thought he'd misread what she'd written. She tried to set the matter straight, but every post she wrote boomeranged on her and he simply became more angry. It puzzled her that others seemed to take his side. She even tried rereading her own post to see what could have been so offensive. It was certainly inadvertent. That was the first time it ever occurred to her that the man was a little off-kilter.

But now, here were those same things mentioned in these emails that related so perfectly to the things Dingo had been saying in the round-robin. Except they were threatening, not just uncomfortable. And now the other Steven Kingly thriller characters were being introduced. It all made sense now. And she had a good idea that the person threatening her was either Dingo or somebody else who had participated in the round-robin.

It wasn't that the risks of playing around on the Internet had never crossed her mind. She'd always been alert to the possibility, but no red flags had ever flown over the innocent games the group of writers had been playing. Wisdom reminded her that this would have always been the case. People don't ever associate with weird people like that knowingly.

Notes: (So, I don't lose my notes, I'll write them right in.) A year and a half later she catches Dingo doing the same thing on the list serv that he'd done to her to another woman.