Any aspiring writers out there?

Hey, I just wanted to see if there are any other aspiring writers out there who'd like to swap stories for a little you-edit-me, I-edit-you action? I'm starting to get involved in a writing group out here in the real world, but I'd like to meet some other writers who share my love of Tiki. I'd like someone who's into the scene to read my tiki-centric ramblings before I foist them upon the general public.

So, would anyone like to start a little on-line Tiki writer's group with me?

I'm a perspiring writer, does that count?

I'm glad to hear people are still thinking of writing fiction based on Tiki. If you look at the old threads on "Is There Such A Thing As A Tiki Novel?" you will see that some people on TC tried to get some momentum going for a Tiki Writers Group a while back...but judging by how the thread died out, I'm assuming it fizzled.

Here it is: http://www.tikicentral.com/viewtopic.php?topic=10163&forum=1&vpost=104899&hilite=typee

I've been thinking of doing a tiki project myself, but I'm also working on my PhD in English Lit and teaching writing classes on the side, so I don't have a lot of time.

However, if you finish a short story or a few chapters of a novel, or even a first act of a script that focuses on Tiki...and want feedback...feel free to e-mail it to me and I'll give you a free critique.

You can check out my website at starvingwriter.com to see some of my older writing and check out some links to writers resources.

Good luck with the writing!

Hey Brian!
Right on topic! Great to hear there are other aspiring writers and creative types out there!
Been working on a children's book since about '03,and have started to flesh out key moments in the story,but haven't attached them yet. I have also written a story for children entitled "the Sun visits the Happy Hut"..More paintings than writings have sprouted from these narratives,but i've been slowly trying to finish this story. You TCers are so great with the brain trust/brainstorming thang! If you're interested, I could get the story typed into the computer in the near future. If you want to see the visual part of the story....
(is this spamming? i hope not!)
http://www.tikicentral.com/viewtopic.php?topic=19904&forum=18&start=0&445
Chongolio's quite a storyteller as well! We'll have to see if he'll join us all!
OH CHOOOOOOOOOOOOOONGO!!!

I would love to be part of a TC writers group if it could actually be put together. If you'd like to see something right away I still have the story I wrote for a writing project that was started a couple of years ago that never happened. Let me know what happens.

Anybody read "Call it Courage" by Armstrong Sperry? It's the classic young adult novel with a Tiki theme. It got some top-notch awards when they used to give awards to good books. Sperry was a great writer, and did some other excellent juvinalia about South Seas Adventures. He was also a frickin' trick artist, too, illustrating a lot of his own work.

Anybody ever heard of Captain Maine Read? He was an astounding 19th century author of seafaring/adventure/South Seas works.

Hey, I've got two short stories about adventures in the Northern Canadian Woods that are funny as hell. (The "Bob's Big Talk" series) They ain't Tiki, but they're pretty fun to read, and real outdoorsy.

Would there be any way to legally protect our literary gems online?
Just wondering, in case some of us get serious about this most important tropi..I mean topic of Tiki lit.

Posting them online guarantees a copyright date on the text. In fact, it's a good thing to do.

It does, however, open them up to lifting; somebody snatching your idea and changing it enough to avoid copyright issues.

For those of you who want to protect your writing, you can download the forms for filing your copyright with the government at http://www.copyright.gov/forms/. Screenplays would fall under Performing Arts (Form PA), but short stories or other fictional works would fall under Form TX. You will have to pay a fee and wait several months for your certificate.

Technically, you have copyright as soon as your thoughts are put down on paper or some other substantial medium. However, for legal necessity, it's good to file a copyright. This lasts for something like 75 years after your death...or longer if you have a managed estate that handles your copyrights and maintains them after your death in a sort of trust.

Works outside of copyright are public domain. If you go to Project Gutenberg and check out the works there, they are all within public domain. The authors are long dead and the estates are not managing the works so there is no legal impediment. You could re-print copies of them without legal hassle and illustrate them however you wanted.

I think it would be fantastic if a bunch of Tiki illustrators did a new version of Herman Melville's Typee with illustrations throughout, for example.

Here's Melville's novel for free if you haven't read it:

http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/results

[ Edited by: Trader Tom 2007-04-01 21:20 ]

On 2007-04-01 15:59, little lost tiki wrote:
Hey Brian!
Right on topic! Great to hear there are other aspiring writers and creative types out there!
Been working on a children's book since about '03,and have started to flesh out key moments in the story,but haven't attached them yet. I have also written a story for children entitled "the Sun visits the Happy Hut"..More paintings than writings have sprouted from these narratives,but i've been slowly trying to finish this story. You TCers are so great with the brain trust/brainstorming thang! If you're interested, I could get the story typed into the computer in the near future. If you want to see the visual part of the story....
(is this spamming? i hope not!)
http://www.tikicentral.com/viewtopic.php?topic=19904&forum=18&start=0&445
Chongolio's quite a storyteller as well! We'll have to see if he'll join us all!
OH CHOOOOOOOOOOOOOONGO!!!

I bought a fun Tiki styled children's book at last year's Tiki Oasis. You can check it out at http://www.mutualpublishing.com/bookinfo.aspx?bookID=261

I think there's a great market for more Tiki styled children's books and I love your art. Sounds great.

[ Edited by: Trader Tom 2007-04-01 21:33 ]

Um, yeah, that's my book.

I'm trying to get a sequel published called "Bad Banana Versus the Veegans" about a bad-assed motocycle riding spam-munching Hawaiian banana whose daughter is kidnapped by a couple of cute Islander hippie girls to be placed on the menu at their smoothie shop.

He rescues her by...

well, you'll just have to read it. It's hard getting the thing published, it's a bit outside the norm.

Cammo, I have that "Courage" book, great Polynesian kids tale. Your book sounds like Veggie tales goes to hawaii, sounds very entertaining!

On 2007-04-01 23:36, Cammo wrote:
Um, yeah, that's my book.

Sorry, Cammo...I shoulda known. The TC handles are fun but they throw me off sometimes. Good luck with getting that next project out there. It sounds fun!

I am into writing, and really appreciate the reference to copyrighting as I have a couple of female characters I want to do that with before I move forward with writing. I like the idea of a TC Writer's Group....count me in.

My characters are better than Veggie Tales because they have arms and legs!

What do you folks want to do, should I post my "Bob's Big Talk" story here or what???

I've also written a 67,000 word novel with a Girl Pirate dream sequence in Chapter 8, but that's a bit longish.

And Armstrong Sperry is my hero. He wrote lots of Tiki/South Seas stuff, y'all should check him out or try to find more stuff beyond "Call it Courage". He actually wrote Polynesia tour books for kids!

Here's his website, it even has a Tapa cloth background!!!

http://www.ogram.org/sperry/

[ Edited by: Cammo 2007-04-02 07:31 ]

I put out a little zine called SWIZZLE which is more atomic / mid-century modern than it is tiki.

All contents © Cam MacMillan 2006,2007

Bob’s Big Talk
"Counting Moose"

When I was a teenager, I spent the summers with my two Indian friends in Algonquin Park learning how to survive in the bush by eating moose and fishing for pickerel. Algonquin Park isn’t a little city park in Canada, it’s a huge forest preserve hundreds of square miles wide. There aren’t any buildings in it, it’s all just trees and swamps and lakes. You need a canoe to go just a few miles into it. It’s real dangerous, dozens of people are killed there every year by getting lost or being eaten by animals.

For college, I went to the Hailibury School of Mining, where they taught us three things; how to find your location on Earth using only a needle, a short twig, and some water, how to find gold using just a sharp knife, and finally how to blow up an entire mountain using a gallon of gas, 6 pickle jars, and a bottle of after shave lotion. I graduated at the top of my class by inventing a new way of exploding things using charcoal and match heads.

At Hailibury they let us use dynamite once a week, it’s my favorite.because of it’s elegance. Dynamite is beautiful when it destroys things. It has a mysterious, ephemeral quality which can’t be analyzed using any known scientific method. I’ve been working with dynamite for 45 years, and never once has it done what it was supposed to do.

For instance, I was hired to dynamite a freeway access road in Lima, Peru in January of 1973. We used only five sticks of dynamite, placed in a concave array. I lit them using a charge coupled series connection, which allowed me to watch it from a mile away. Instead of blowing up the new road, though, it blew up the construction crew, half the church beside it, and destroyed the water viaduct that supplied Lima with all of it’s potable water. I decided to run away and get on the first plane back to Canada because a good engineer studies all of the original calculations at his desk when something goes wrong. My desk was back in Canada.

I don’t know if they’re still looking for an explanation. I’ve never been back to Peru.

Here’s something strange that happened to me once, since you’re listening so good. It’s the story of the first time I ever used dynamite, way before college. One summer the Canadian government paid $5.00 for every moose counted in any Canadian forest. They wanted to know how many there were. Anybody could make $5.00 by finding a moose, taking a photo of it to prove you had seen it, and making measurements of it for statistical purposes. Actually, I thought they should have only paid us a buck a moose, but this was the government, y’know? My two Indian friends, Joe Crowfeet and Elja Farcry and I decided to make some easy money, so we headed to Algonquin Park again and camped there for a few months. We were so far into the park we didn’t see anybody else the whole time, which was great because we wanted to count our own moose. We tried to find one, but it was hard. They’re really shy. We sat up at night waiting for those dumb moose, we waited in trees all day trying to spy them below, but nothing worked. They were really hard to see. We knew they were out there, but we couldn’t find them. I was wrong, you see? A buck a moose was way too low. Even five bucks was almost nothing for all the work we put into it.

Then we found it. The dead moose. It was the only moose we ever saw. It was so dead. Little animals had eaten out the whole body, leaving the skin and bones. It looked like a deflated moose balloon. We stood around looking at the dead moose, feeling real sorry for ourselves, watching the flies buzz around. Then Joe and Elja walked right up to the thing, and started pulling at the fur. It stank so bad, I didn’t want to touch it, but those guys pulled and pushed at the tough skin, and started talking about tanning it. Then they whipped out their knives, big shiny things with antler-bone handles, I never thought we’d need those big knives but here they were doing the job slitting the moose belly up from the legs to the chin. Mostly worms poured out, then we all dragged it down to the water to soften the thing up a bit. It took all day to clean that thing, and the smell and worms didn’t matter so much after a while. It kind of made you not want to eat for a few days, though. My job was the bones, I had to sever the tight tendons, borrowing Elja’s knife, and scraped the things right down. Then I washed them all, and laid them out in a big pattern just like you’d see in a Natural History book. Jim softened the skin up, scraped the muscle and fat off, then pegged the whole mess out in the sun, upside down. The pegs were big pine branches, they had to be big cause the skin would shrink and tighten up a lot over the next few days, pulling hard at them.

We did a right smart job of it ‘cause we had a plan.

Three days later those bones were dry and white. The skin was still smelly, but it was soft now. Then we really got to work.

We gathered a lot of moss, you know that old saying, ‘a rolling stone gathers no moss’ well we gathered all the moss the stone left behind, and then some more. We gathered a mountain of it. Then we tied the bones together with string, shoelaces, tentlines, anything we had around, then put the skin back on. And stuffed it with the moss.

Bingo. Instant moose. That moose didn’t look so healthy, but it looked sort of alive again if you didn’t look too close.

We called her Jill.

Then we just photographed Jill from different angles at different times of the day. All over the place, in the lake, behind some trees, drinking water, lying down sleeping, hell, we could have put Jill up in a tree if we wanted and taken pictures of her roosting. We ended up having 572 pictures of that moose, with different measurements all written down nice and neat. At the beginning of July, we went back to Red Lake, developed the photos, and sent them on to Ottawa. It only took a week to get our check back for $2860.00. We divided it three ways and made $953.00 each. We actually had our picture in the Globe and Mail newspaper, next to the story of how we had counted more moose than any other team in Canada that summer. We were heroes. It created such interest and amazement in the wildlife community that the Ministry of Fish and Game decided to thin out the moose population. “Thin out” means kill as many as possible. They thought Algonquin Park was in the middle of a moose plague; a moose invasion. They paid people $50.00 per moose now to kill them. All you had to bring back was a piece of the moose – the nose, the eyeballs, the antlers, anything as proof.

We were just kids, you know? We had never shot a moose before. Elja had a pretty good .22, but that isn’t much use on a moose, even if we could find a real one this time.

So I thought up a plan. If I could have bought some dynamite, I would have, but that was illegal. I could buy dynamite “caps”, though. They were small, round explosives that ignited larger pieces of dynamite. Just one was strong enough to blow up a car, for instance. My friends and I bought about 100 dynamite caps from an army surplus store in small lots of 5 or 6 each, so nobody would get suspicious. Then we bought 10 bushels of apples, and went right back up to Algonquin Park. We made traps there, all over the place in the marshy areas where we thought the moose lived. They were rigged up good, Joe Crowfeet was great at trapping. All the moose had to do was try to take one bite of a yummy apple we had left out in plain sight, and BLAM the dynamite cap it was attached to would blow up. Goodbye moose.

It worked great. It worked too well, because every animal in Algonquin seemed to like apples. Squirrels, beavers, deer, BLAM BLAM BLAM, we got at least five big explosions a day in the swamps. It was hard keeping up with them. Almost nothing was left of the animals - they vaporized in the explosion. We found fur, teeth, toes… and collected what we could find in a big bag. The meat we found was cooked by the explosion, so we ate pretty good every night. At the end of August we took everything back to Ottawa and gave the bag to the Wildlife Department.

We were scared they’d be mad at us for killing the other animals, but nope. They weren’t much of a wildlife ministry, because they thought everything in the bag was a moose. Everything, even the tiny little teeth from some five inch long chipmunk. They were happy with our great job, and we got our picture in the paper again.

Money –wise, let’s see. They counted 62 different chunks of fur, tooth, or meat. That’s $3100.00 or $1033.00 each. I think we killed a lot more than 62, but we didn’t want to argue.

There was some moral to this story, but I forgot what it was. We made a lot of dough that summer, though.

Hey, what happened to this writing club? Post something! Anything! It can't be worse than my "Bob's Big Talk" series! (That's impossible.) Tiki, not Tiki, anything!

If ya don't post something, and quick, I'll post Bob's next installment, the "Thunder Bay" story!

C'mon! Stop 'aspiring' and start 'perspiring'!

I printed out the copyright applications and those got be perspiring quite a bit. Gonna do them and also get a business license in my community. I have several reference books on writing and getting published. That is all fine and dandy, but it would be good to hear some stories from folks on how they got published and if they feel they are successful as a writer. I am just starting out on my journey and have a long way to go. There is a writer's club in the community where I live, they meet when I am at work, but may join anyway, moght get some good networking or directions.

Has anyone podcasted through iTunes? That would be a good way to get your stuff to the masses I think???

1. Again, posting a story on TC, then not editing the post in the future is a perfectly reasonable way of attaching a copyright date to your stories. That's all a copyright form does. You should also send things to DC to be copyrighted, but posting them here is quick, fun, and an ideal way of fixing an exact date to your work. Simply include a copyright notice and your name at the beginning or end of your story as I've done.

2. A Tip; you needn't fill out a seperate form for everything you've done when you send it in to Washington. Simply print out everything and send it in one huge batch, say once a year. eg. Title of work; "Stacy's Work 2007".

3. I wouldn't worry too much about the problems of publishing until you've written a LOT first. Your first concern shouldn't be where to put the Pulitzer Prize. Most writers have 8-12 novels in the top drawer before they first get published.

4. Write write write! Get to work! A writer is a person who WRITES, not a person who wants to write!

5. So lets see the stuff! C'mon folks post!

Years and years ago I used to be into roleplaying games (Dungeons and Dragons, Middle Earth, Cthulhu, Vampire The Masquerade, etc...). I used to run campaigns for my friends and design the adventures from scratch. It was storytelling, but just in another format. They got to roll dice and make decisions, but it was basically a collaborative process.

Last year, I got a wild hair and thought it would be cool to make a roleplaying game based on Pop Polynesia...not based totally in authentic Polynesian history or settings...but a fantasy world with all the great imagery and themes that we see on Tiki Central. I wrote about 35 pages of stuff...then got sidetracked onto other projects.

Here was my intro to the game:

Welcome to the Tiki Islands! The islands belong to an alternate dimension that is parallel to Earth but has progressed quite differently. This world resembles Earth but has no major continents. Instead, it is dotted with small islands of varying sizes and populated with people whose race and culture most closely resembles the Polynesian people of our own world. Though there are some striking similarities, there are also major differences.

In our world, Pop Polynesia is recognized as a sub culture…but in the Tiki Islands it’s the norm. In our world, a well-prepared tiki drink is magical for the imbiber. In the Tiki Islands a well-prepared tiki drink is just plain magical. In our world, theme parks and bars give us an exotic escape from everyday life…but in the Tiki Islands, every day is an exotic adventure!

How do you start?

In this game, you may role-play either a native or an outsider who inhabits the Tiki Islands. Outsiders have somehow crossed over from Earth. Most have no idea how they arrived and have no knowledge of how to return home, but there are working dimensional portals to return them back and forth if they can find them in their adventures.

This game can be played with dice and paper. It’s not a live action game. I wouldn’t urge someone to hurl themselves into a volcano, become a headhunter, or take on a great white shark…however, the drink potions mentioned throughout are all based on real drinks.

It goes on from here to define around 20 character classes, set up a couple of loosely outlined initial adventures, and give descriptions of some of the islands. The last ten pages are descriptions of monsters, magic items, and magical effects of properly prepared tiki drinks.

So, I guess my question is...should I dust this off and work on it? Is anybody on Tiki Central even into roleplaying games, or is that too nerdy?

Alternatively, (and this is more in line with what I've been thinking of lately) I was hoping some of you writers might be interested in taking a look at the story universe I set up for the game, then each of us could write some short stories that take place in the same mythical world. We could probably put together a nice little anthology of related stories that are all connected.

In the same way that the "Hawaiian Dick" comics fused the hard-boiled detective genre with Tiki, I think Tiki would combine nicely with fantasy.

Thoughts?

If you're interested, PM me and I'll send you the 30 odd pages of the unfinished game to take a look at.

I warned ya. Here it is.

Copyright Cam MacMillan 2006, 2007. All rights reserved.

the Bob’s Big Talk series
"Thunder Bay"

This took place what, forty, forty-five years ago?

My first job was with the Dow Chemical Company. They had a Thunder Bay office, it’s way up north past Sudbury, and I was hired to do odd jobs for a drilling outfit that was stitching the area. “Stitching” is drilling for gold and silver samples. You drill every mile in a big grid pattern, and stitch up the points with surface samples. Anyway, they hadn’t found any gold, and the guys had been at it for almost 6 months solid. These men were professional miners, big hard-drinking muscular guys, pretty rough. I came on a few weeks before they were scheduled to take a vacation, so my job was pretty easy. Mostly I handled the dynamite during the day, and later they let me clean their heavy equipment, the three-point drilling rigs that Hughes was making around that time.

Well, the guys all wanted to go back to Thunder Bay for their vacation. There was a big Forestry Potlach scheduled for the next week, that’s a fancy festival the loggers put on where they show off for the tourists. Maybe you don’t know, but miners hate loggers, and loggers sure as hell hate miners. When a miner finds a strike, like gold or silver, his company buys everything up and doesn’t let it be logged anymore. They don’t even let logging roads go through, that’s what the loggers hate, they can’t even get to the big trees. And the same goes the other way - if a logging company buys a whole forest, you can’t mine it, even if there’s the biggest gold mine in the world on it. They won’t even let you look. They’ll kill you if you try, there’s all kinds of stories about snoopy guys disappearing up north. Our guys from Dow just HATED those loggers. They wanted to go to Thunder Bay to wreck their festival, by winning the Sleeping Giant Race. That was a big obstacle course that was set up on the side of this mountain that looks exactly like a sleeping giant. The prize money was ten thousand. Five of the guys had pooled their money to get back to Thunder Bay for the week, and they were going the next day. They asked me to go too, to watch their dynamite while they were in the contest. It’s a rule that all dynamite had to be watched twenty-four hours a day, to keep thieves away. You get in a lot of trouble if you lose dynamite sticks. When we got to Thunder Bay, they even gave me a gun and a few bullets I was supposed to keep in my socks to guard the dynamite with.

I never saw the festival. The first day I just sat there at the top of Sleeping Giant mountain, beside the truck, watching that dynamite. It didn’t move much. After a while I figured that the dynamite didn’t need to be watched all the time. I left for a few minutes, keeping an eye on the truck, trying to find where the festival was, but I kept thinking, “What if somebody breaks into the other side of the truck and steals the dynamite?” I was really worried about that truck, and finally decided that I’d better just take the dynamite out of it and sit it on the ground where I could see it and still walk around. The Sleeping Giant Race was supposed to be that day, and I really wanted to catch a bit of it. I was just a kid, y’know? That festival was a real big deal. So I unlocked the truck and hauled this big red box out onto the grass. Explosives are always stored in red boxes, and this one had warning signs all over it. I think they got the box from Nova Scotia or Newfoundland first, because it had pictures of fish underneath the “DANGER” warnings. It still smelled kind of fishy, too. Then I walked over to the edge of the grassy field, where I could hear sounds of a crowd. There was nobody there. It was just the side of the mountain. The festival must be happening down the road a bit. I took out my pipe, and sat down for a smoke. In those days we didn’t have money for tobacco, but we just grabbed anything that was dry and stuffed it in our pipes. I grabbed a handful of dried thistle and smoked for a while. It was kind of depressing, I mean, I had come all the way to Thunder Bay, but couldn’t see anything! I wasn’t too sad, though, because at least it wasn’t hard work. That made me think of the dynamite, and I looked back to the truck but it was behind a grove of birch trees from where I was sitting, so I moved around a bit to get a better look at it.

Somebody was inside the back of the truck. I could see them bending over the other crates of dynamite. It couldn’t be one of our guys, because he would have called for me when he didn’t find me there. I pulled my gun out, and searched for my bullets. They weren’t in my sock. Up until then I was feeling pretty good about this burglar. With a loaded gun in your hand, it’s easy to be brave. Now I remembered that the bullets were in the glove compartment, locked in the front of the truck. I had to do something, so instead, I decided to bluff it out, pretending to have a loaded gun and hoped that Mr. Burglar didn’t have a real one himself. I quietly crawled closer to the truck, and got to within a few feet of the back gate. The dynamite box outside was still sitting there, right where I had left it. The thief must be going after the bigger box inside. Slowly, I looked over the edge of the gate, staring into the dark interior.

Right in front of me, staring right back, was the biggest, angriest, ugliest bear I’ve ever seen. It was a HUGE ten foot tall grizzly, and Mr. Bear was MAD. He had smelled the fish boxes, and was wondering where all the fish were. This was the end of summer, and bears were trying to fatten up for the winter. No fish. But here I was, his substitute lunch.

I’d never seen a bear before, nope. Well, yeah, in a zoo, but it was sleeping and behind bars. This one was gigantic, and it wasn’t sleepy.

I backed away quick, and the only thing I could think of was to grab the dynamite box on the ground and throw it at him. I picked it up, but a second before throwing it, I thought, “Hey, it’s going to blow up the whole damn mountain, and me with it, am I crazy?” and then I didn’t know what to do.

“GGGGRRRRROOOOOOOOWL,” the bear roared, and it came after me. I ran. Most people see me, they see a pretty skinny kid, you know? They don’t think I’m very good in sports, or in running or swimming, but that day I could have beat Jessie Owens in the 5000 meter. I ran across the field, down that mountain, somebody put rockets on my feet I ran so fast. The ground went by like I was in a racing car looking out the window, except it was me doing the running. Every time I looked back, there was that bear coming after me, it’s teeth dripping saliva all over it’s chest. I saw a big arrow sign that read “Potlach Race This Way!” and I ran where it pointed, and then there I was in a big crowd of people, but they were all screaming cause they saw the bear too, but that bear only saw me and maybe it was smelling that fish box full of dynamite I was still carrying. Then a gun went off, and I hoped it was somebody trying to kill the bear, but it was the start of the Sleeping Giant Race and everybody was running all around me but they were slow compared to me and the bear. We were doing 55 in a 25 mile-an-hour zone. We ran down that mountain, we swam across a river, we climbed through this narrow tunnel thing, and I kept following the little red arrow signs that were nailed into the trees that we passed. I tried to throw the dynamite at the bear a few times, but every time I turned around he got a bit closer, and if I dropped it, it would blow us both up. So we finally came out into this big area with lots of people and flags and a big band playing out of these huge loudspeakers that were almost as big as the bear, and everybody started cheering! I thought, “What the hell are they cheering for? If the bear eats me, are they going to cheer even more?” and then there was this long yellow band of ribbon in front of us, under a sign that said, FINISH, and I ran right through that ribbon, but it got tangled around my legs, and the other end of the ribbon got wrapped around the bear, and suddenly we were a ball of fighting, dirty claws and fangs and…

I threw the dynamite. It missed the bear, but kept right on going, up, up, up through the air and then down into the middle of a bunch of people standing around this big statue of that lumberjack, Paul Bunyan and Babe, his big Blue Ox, which was the whole center of the Logging Festival where all the awards are given out. The box came down and I don’t know if you know this, but you gotta be real careful with dynamite cause if you drop it, it goes BOOM. The box came down real slow, and me and the bear watched it coming down, I guess Mr. Bear was watching his lunch go away and I was watching to see what happens when a whole fish box full of 65Kg. per stick of dynamite falls 30 feet onto a hard surface. What happens is that everything within 100 feet of it goes away real fast. Anything within 50 feet of it disappears into powder, like magic. We were about 75 feet away, and I was blown so far I went halfway back up that darn mountain. Nobody ever saw the bear again, which is too bad ‘cause I was starting to get kind of fond of that rascal.

The best part was Paul Bunyan, though. He got the worst of the blast. The statue was made out of fiberglass, so even though it was like 4 stories high, it was pretty light, and it went way up in the air. It just launched. It looked like it was heading to the moon, maybe. It was still going up, up, up when I fell on my head. It had smoke coming out of it’s feet, and Paul went way on up into the clouds, turned around, and decided to come on back down. It smashed in a big explosion of splintered wood, fiberglass and red paint. I sat there on the ground, looking around, wondering if I had killed anybody and trying to look innocent when one of those logger officials dragged himself to his feet right beside me, pointed right at my face and yelled “It’s YOUR fault!”

I tried to run again, but my legs were too tired. Then a whole group of people came yelling right towards me. I tried to push them away cause I thought they were going to arrest me, but it was my friends from Dow and they were really happy!

“YOU WON THE RACE!” one of them shouted.

It turned out that I had run faster and better than anybody who had ever run the Sleeping Giant Race. In the 26 years of it’s history, the fastest time had been 18 minutes, 4 seconds. I had done it in less than half that time, 7 minutes 32 seconds. It was a world record. That means that not only did we win the $10,000.00, but I also got a $5000.00 bonus prize and a small extra stipend for every year somebody couldn’t beat the time. To this day I get a check for $82.00 from the Logging Association, cause nobody’s even come close to my 7 minute time. Jesse Owens even sent me a letter congratulating me, it’s down in my basement , you can see it anytime you want.

Maybe people were hurt or killed, I don’t know. There were a few people they didn’t find, but nobody could prove that they had actually died, so it never really came to anything. It was all an accident anyway, and everybody had seen the bear chasing me, so what the heck? The only thing that bothered me was that we couldn’t find Big Jake. Jake was one of the Dow guys, and nobody could figure out where he had gone. About an hour later he showed up in the crowd, with a piece of paper in his hand. That piece of paper was normal sized, but it looked like one of those little post-it notes in Big Jake’s paw. He gathered us together, told us to be quiet, and led us over to the huge round crater the dynamite had made.

“I’ve been at the assay and land office,” he told us. I didn’t know what he was talking about then, but those other guys from Dow sure looked interested. We were all standing around the crater, and Jake pointed down. We all looked, following his finger, and the whole bottom of the crater was shiny. It looked like pieces of a giant mirror had smashed and melted all over everything. Stinky Ed, the guy standing beside me, started to smile.

“Silver,” he said. “You got the deed?”

“Oh yeah,” Big Jake said back, real quiet. “It’s ours.”

Jake had blown the whole ten grand in prize money on buying the crater.

Well, I’d like to tell you my dynamite had discovered the biggest silver mine in the world, but it didn’t because that stuff wasn’t silver after all. It was nickel. Nickel is a metal just like silver, only harder and shinier. They use it a lot for coating things to make them look like silver, like car keys, but the biggest use of it is in making nickels, those 5 cent coins everybody carries around. Nickel isn’t as valuable as silver, but it’s used a lot. Nickel isn’t too rare, but finding this much of it was. And it’s needed everywhere.

I had discovered the biggest nickel mine in the world.

Actually, Dow Chemical ended up owning it. They bought all the land in 20 miles from that site, cornered the nickel market by buying up some mines in South Africa that were producing the raw ore, shut them down, and announced a few days later that they owned all the available nickel in the world. That made Dow stock go up 6.4%, which means they made 27 million in one hour. My friends and I made out great, Jake runs Inco Mining from it’s main office in Sudbury these days, he pulls down a good 6 figures for testing the coffee every morning, and we all ended up owning 0.5% of the gross profits. That doesn’t sound like much, but think about it. Look in your pocket, because that nickel in there beside the dimes and pennies came from our mine.

Stinky Ed and the guys wanted to build a big statue in Sudbury of me, the bear and a flying case of dynamite, but the city council voted it down and built this gigantic nickel there instead. You can still see it, the Big Nickel in the center of Sudbury, 40 feet high, made of our metal.

That’s the end of the story. There was some moral to it all, but I forgot what it was. We sure made a lot of dough that summer, though.

Cammo,

I'm loving your Bob's Big Talk series. I especially like that each story has absolutely no moral! The tall tale is a great genre and you allude back to Paul Bunyan and other classics...but I see some other influences there also. At times, I'm reminded of Mark Twain's work (especially ROUGHING IT) and at other times the tone is almost like Garrison Keiller. My father is really into all manner of North Woods and Wilderness fiction. He especially likes Sigurd F. Olson. I'll have to send him links to read your two stories. He'd appreciate them.

You got any Tiki Talk Tall Tales? Sorry, couldn't resist the alliteration...

Thanks, Tommo -

That's funny you should mention your dad, these stories are all made up but totally based on my father's (Bob is my dad) experiences in the northern woods. He's a big fan of that type of fiction, too. I just wanted to write something that had a real strong voice, and wanted to get some ideas down that have been bubbling away in my subconscious.

Here's a few writing tips;

1. Pay attention to detail. The smallest bits are the ones that make a story true, like in the above where I mention the exact amount the stock goes up. More true details, better story every time.

2. A sense of place. Every story should happen in a setting you know inside out, and one that is interesting. Base it on your friend's house layout, or a strange place you've lived in.

3. Never describe what's happening. Describe what your character sees happening instead, or a friend of the main character, or a cat, whatever.

And I've got some Tiki stuff, but it's a new kid's book that needs the illustrations to show what's happening. And I've got a novel with a Pirate Girl Dream, but it's the chapter that explains a lot of the mysteries happening in the book and would ruin the whole plot to post it here.

Meanwhile, I'm thinking of doing another Big Talk story.

About fish. And mining. And mosquitoes.

This was cool and interesting and just discovered in Sept of 2010.

'Hope your writing is going well.

First draughts should be written at light speed, with no concern for spelling, continuity, punctuation, grammar, spelling. It's all about creating something you can then edit.