Backwoods Boy

By strange coincidence, I've been using this principle for a year now with respect to the Bing Image Creator. It's an interesting study in English to produce prompts which easily pass the Microsoft pornography test but which AI understands perfectly. Of course MS strains out most of the objectionable images on the way back, but sometimes that fails too. Unfortunately, the Bing team eventually learns about the synonyms and I have to look for new techniques. I'm tempted to send them a bill for services rendered.

Thanks for reading my brief flight of fancy, Jason. Yes, I played the oboe, and I've been told that produced some interesting umm... side effects

Thanks for your kind words, Mark. My own fascination with the indigenous culture on this continent led to the story. All of the cultural locations - museum, wilderness, and vision quest sites - exist and influenced my thinking and writing. The latter was up the hill a mile behind my childhood home. I still go there from time to time. And I pretty much live in the Indian Heaven Wilderness during September and early October

Thanks for sharing this, Wolf. It's a great way of remembering a very personable and popular author, and a good friend to many on this site. It's unfortunate you couldn't finish the project with Carlos, but perhaps this very intriguing beginning could be developed into more? A world of its own? Or I can conceive of ways it could be integrated into Running with the Pack. Sorry, my imagination is running wild I also note elements in this chapter which parallel events in your earlier writing. Experiences, even less than optimal ones, can be very useful when developing stories.

The first version was before I thought things out in advance, and Dakota was one of those characters who had no real purpose. Besides a real ending, another thing that bothered me in earlier versions was a lack of explanation for Pahana's healing power. The Hawaiian connection was conceived of to explain that, but a little research into Hawaiian culture, mythology and mysticism turned "Kahoni" and "Pueo" into a lot more than that. Amazing how things just sort of grow, isn't it? As you know, I first came here to read your autobiographical stories, but it didn't take long to get hooked on Running with the Pack - version one. I suppose there will always be errors of some kind, but to paraphrase the owner of another site, if it reaches the heart, a few grammar errors don't matter

Thanks for looking at this one, Mark. I appreciate your interest

And thank you for taking the time to read it again. I don't know if you had seen this chapter before. I'm sure the first version ended with the Shago chapter, but that was one of the problems in my opinion - it didn't have a good ending.

Thanks, Wolf. There's even some voyeurism going on in this version, given that Kahoni is there in his owl form. Except he's just there as an official witness, of course.

I got my start with paper files inherited from my uncle, which I expanded on, and was excited when my paper research got me back another generation or two. Now I can go to Ancestry and zoom back even further from the research of others. Let's hear it for information overload

I missed this earlier. A sequel is a distinct possibility as a winter project.

You may recall that Benny was sexually involved early on with Pahana in earlier versions. You pointed here at my objective in changing that - Benny needed to be the ultimate big brother and mentor and not have "other things" interfering with that

Thanks, as always, for your encouragement and support Wolf

You remember correctly. Karen and a couple other characters materialized to fill in some gaps in Dallen's experiences enroute to his goal.

Thank, Mark. As you may have gathered from comments, this story has gone through a couple of iterations in various venues. It's one that was important to me from the start, and I wanted to get right, and I feel like this version reached my goal

You know how sometimes getting a chapter right is like pulling teeth? The midnight adventure just "flowed from the pen" the first time around, and it is the piece that has survived both rewrites virtually unchanged. It was great fun to write, and I'm glad you're enjoying it again.