The Dark Tower, Stephen King

The Dark Tower was supposed to be the final book in the Dark Tower series. However, their is an eight volume. This seventh volume is a bit of a monster at 745 pages.

The birth of Mordred, son of Roland and Susannah, but more a minion of horror, is born. Whatever question I had about how he might turn out is quickly determined. His evil is not brought about by conditioning from the minions of Hell, but rather he is already a demon already. I recall how Sin gave birth to her child: it clawed its way through her belly. I had thought maybe something like that was in store for the Mia/Detta/Susannah collective that are the personality complex of this character. 

When Mia gives her breast to Modred (perhaps to be renamed later, or not), he shows what he truly is. His belly has a crimson brand like the belly of a black widow spider. Its darkest nature is eloquently portrayed by King in one of his divine (perhaps Satanic) displays of narrative poetry as Mia nurses her baby:

Blood had begun to pour fro her breast (where the baby had fed). The baby drank it like milk, losing not a drop... She (Mia) reached out and stroked the still-changing freak at her breast, the black spider with the tiny human head... Her cheeks and brow and throat, flushed dark with the exertions of childbirth only a moment before, faded to the waxy whiteness of orchid petals.

At this point, now, I am just over half way done this seventh volume. Main characters are dying. One, Eddie the junkie, dies from carelessness. Another, Jake the kid Chambers, dies saving Stephen King's life. While the books are fairly well written, I didn't find any hardness in my throat or tears for the characters. Despite 'knowing' them for such a long time, I guess I never really got into them emotionally. Their deaths, in particular, Jake's, are well played and the death scenes are well done. But, for whatever reason, the emotional connection just isn't there: a touch closer to the boy, but still the distance between characters and reader (at least for me) is too distant to feel the strength of empathy of character required. When's the last time a book made me cry? I can't really recall. So, maybe it's just me being hard hearted ('may it do ya fine,' King might add).

King's involvement in the story is probably one of the more interesting facets of this tale. His involvement has grown considerably, and the involvement in King's life of the characters has grown as well. As mentioned, Jake's sacrifice is what keeps the van from ending Stephen King and The Dark Tower series. Whether he is the creator of this world or not--the book says not, he's just a medium of 'Dan-tet,' a kind of fate or an oracle--however, if his telling of the story was of no importance to the development of this imaginary world, why would his life really matter (to this imaginary world)? The oracle doesn't make fate, does it? It merely provides a riddle which becomes unraveled throughout the telling.

An aspect of King's involvement in the story that is interesting is how candid he is in self description. He avoids writing The Dark Tower series because of fear. But it's also revealed that all of his books are in some way related to it, some more, some less.

At this point, I have finished the end of The Dark Tower. Originally, I think King meant for the tale to end here. Of course there is an eighth book (there should be 19 books in all...) The last book was pretty good. Everyone except Roland and his new buddy die in the end. But, Susannah manages to escape her own fate: she abandons the quest for the dark tower just before they come to it, and, unless book 8 yanks her happy ending away, she's reunited with another world's version of Eddie and Jake (who are now brothers and have been waiting for her).

For Roland, the ending isn't nearly so kind. He refers to ka so much in the book (King's word for fate). There is often talk about worlds that only go forwards whose timelines cannot be repeated. However, Roland is forced back in time to redo his adventure from the point where volume one begins: Roland hunting down Walter to avenge his part in destroying Roland's family and friends.

Maybe this was what drove his antagonist mad: the constant repetition of a hard struggle. Maybe this was why he was working so hard to destroy the dark tower and these beams of existence or creation.

King has been given a fun series to read. Earlier books had a certain poetry (sometimes feeling forced, at others natural and brilliant), middle books trudged through a morass of words, but the last two books were well written with book seven being the highlight at the end of the tunnel. I will get to book eight soon enough, but, since I read somewhere that it really belonged past the middle but before the end, I don't feel that same sense of needing to read it. There are so many books to read, so little time.

I'm thinking The Stand is next, or perhaps it'll be book eight after all.

Song of Susannah, Stephen King

Song of Susannah is the sixth book of Stephen King's series, The Dark Tower. Its length is listed at 432 pages. So, it is significantly shorter than the volumes before, but longer than the first two.

At this point I have read more than 3/4 of this volume. Although it doesn't quite have the beauty of some of the earlier volumes, I nonetheless have enjoyed it quite a bit better than Wolves of the Calla. There are some quite interesting aspects to it which I will get into shortly.

This book is centered around Susannah having Roland's demonic baby. She has been hijacked, yet again, by a new personality. However, it is different in that this is not one of her own personalities, but rather a new individual altogether. She has fled from the Calla in an effort to bring to term the pregnancy in another dimension of earth.

The ka-tet (Stephen King's expression to describe a kind of tightly knit posse, brought together by fate) is split into two: one to rescue or recover Susannah, and the other to obtain the property rights to the land in New York on which the sacred wild rose lives. Jake, Oy, and Callahan go in pursuit of Susannah while Roland and Eddie go after Calvin Tower, the owner of the New York property.

One scene disappointed me: when Susannah first appears in New York for the deliverance of the baby, she robs a lady of her shoes. I find the stereotype disturbing.

Probably one of the most interesting aspects to this book is the involvement of Stephen King as a character and plot twist. King writes himself in as a kind of God or conduit. The question of either being a kind of God or a conduit is never answered. Does Stephen King invent the characters, worlds, and events that take place in the books, or is he merely a conduit for them? When Roland and Eddie meet Stephen King, King knows less about what is going on than they do. King is at the point in his life where The Dark Tower series lies nearly forgotten in a box. He has, he says, essentially run away from the book, and speaks of his fear of it: is it the fear that he cannot complete the series? that he isn't good enough to complete the series? is it the fact of living within the story, as writers do as they are written, frightening to him? These are some of the other questions that I think he, the character and maybe the writer, come up with.

In any case, at this point of the story, I have enjoyed it quite a bit. There is none of the slow paced, pointless rambling that pained me through Wolves of the Calla. In King's phraseology, "Thank ye sai!"

I finished it! Good book. I really enjoyed it from beginning to end.

Sparingly, King indulges the reader in some terrific horrific imagery:

...the smell in the air hadn't been pork. The thing turning on the spit, brown as a squab, was a human baby. The creatures around it dipped delicate china cups into the drippings beneath, toasted each other... and drank.

 Susannah gives birth in the 19th chapter of the novel: quite fitting considering the repeating theme of the number 19. The story, for the most part, ends here. But then there's an interesting twist.

King writes himself into the story once again. How much of it is fiction, how much of it is biography? I don't know. I really love how he describes going over an old manuscript (The Gunslinger):

Usually working on an old story is about as appetizing as eating a sandwich made with moldy bread.

I think I would liken it to putting on dirty clothes after taking a long hot bath.

This last chapter seems to be a series of journal entries that somehow involve the creation and selling of the The Dark Tower series. Again, is this fact or fiction? I'm very, very curious. Curiouser and curiouser! One interesting thing he writes is, "...books were treasures you protected with your life." I can't help but wonder if that sentiment had anything to do with the creation of the book dealer. I can't imagine, having read what King wrote on working on an old manuscript that he could contemplate rereading his own journal and throwing in relevant bits and pieces. Surely they are fictional entries loosely autobiographical.

There's something particularly beautiful about this last chapter. It's the kind of last chapter that I wish all of my favorite authors of my favorite books had written: imagine Tolkien having a chapter like that after his Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit! Imagine Paradise Lost, and regained, by our great poet Milton, having a chapter like this? How about Asimov, or Heinlein, or any of the others? I think if all the books had sucked as bad as Wolves of the Calla and they had ended with this journey into the creation of this series, it would have all been worth reading. King has a fantastic narrative ability which transcends fiction.

This excerpt also gave me a good chuckle:

The worst thing to happen this week, I hope, will be my wife's bed coillapsing under the weight of our son and daughter-in-law--the idiots were wrestling on it.

I'm still laughing!

One of these days I'm going to do my '50 best novels' or 'writers' or something. You know, one of those lists that only means something to me. Kind of like this reading journal that I keep, the stories that I write, the poems that I wrote... I wonder where I'd put King. He definitely belongs on that list.

Wolves of the Calla, Stephen King

Image from Corey Morgan

This is the fifth book of The Dark Tower series, by Stephen King. It's of equal length to book four, and thus the exponential growth of page numbers seems to have comAmazon, the book ranges in price from $.69 for a second hand copy to $20.85 for the library binding. The ebook is a reasonable $7.29.

The introduction is new for this novel, which is good. The rampant growth in the books' girth from book one to book four was quite impressive. However, the growth at this point seems to have subsided. It is roughly the same length as book four.

The story begins away from the main characters. A village gets raided for 1/2 of each twin set of sons and daughters every 24 or so years. This time, they want to fight back, and look to hire the young gunslingers, Roland and his two partners, to protect the village. It has a more than passing semblance to the western movie, The Magnificent Seven (itself an appropriated from the movie, Seven Samurai). King acknowledges that this, among many other novels, contributed to the creation of this book.

For the most part, this book has been the most difficult to get through. The side story about Callahan is entertaining. But for the most part, the book feels tired and uninspired. I'm more than half way through it. Books like this are like a tar pit: you struggle to get through it and you can't really do anything about it. You've already stepped in it (this is book five, right?). Gotta slog through it...

OK, finished slogging now... the book is done. This one was not fun. It had some enjoyable moments, but for the most part I didn't like it. Had it been book one and not book five, I likely would have walked away from it. However, one must sometimes read through or miss important parts that need be known in book six. And, even if books six to eight are as sluggish as book five, I will probably still read every word just to see how the Dark Tower series ends.

There were no really brilliant parts to this book. It was uninspired and dull. I will have to write later if it was worth it after I have finished the series.

Suspension of disbelief is an important component of a book. You have to accept things like robots with antennae which, when shot or cleavered off with a titanium plate, disconnects them from the controller and they 'die.' I can accept that. What is harder to accept is the role of the android (not really a robot, Stephen), Andy (short for android perhaps?) warns the town that these wolves are coming. They decide to seek out the help of Roland and his posse. Then, later on, it's revealed that Andy is in fact a spy and agent for those who seek to harvest some kind of telepathic essence that twins are born with. Why would Andy betray both those who control him and those whom he has fooled into believing he was a kind of simpletonish friend?

But, this wasn't a huge drag on the book. Again, one must suspend disbelief or else miss out on a reading science fiction, horror, and fantasy.

I kind of like the cameo Stephen King does at the end. He becomes a part of the narrative as do some of his books. I find that interesting and wonder where he will go with that.

Wizard and Glass, Stephen King

The fourth book, like the others, continues the pattern of growth that the second and third set. The Gunslinger, according to Google, has 224 pages. The Drawing of the Three has 400 pages. The Wastelands 512, and I'm now into Wizard and Glass at 787. Regardless, a second hand paperback copy is available for as little as one penny on Amazon, while the Kindle version is $10.75. So, it is only a modest increase in price despite there being a full novel's worth of extra material.

The book has an introduction and an afterword that are original. So, unlike the first three novels, there is some little interest here. In the afterword, it's quite interesting to note how many years passed between King's writing of the third and fourth installation of The Dark Tower series.

Due to the sluggishness of The Wastelands, I had a good deal of fear that Wizard and Glass would feel equally dull through an even greater number of pages. However, I couldn't have been further from the truth. The Drawing of the Three was OK, with some sections that were good. But it just didn't have the literary flare or beauty that The Gunslinger had. And, for quite a number of pages, Wastelands was sheer drudgery that almost caused me to drop the book and move onto something else. Wizard and Glass, however, is another animal. Stephen King really mastered his craft when he forged this volume. I might even be so bold as to say that this volume is superior to the first. Where in the first volume was a mixed bag of genius and tired-and-forced expressions, there is none of that forced or tired feel to this volume. It reads brilliantly. I don't know what King was doing as he was writing this, but he was a bloody poet through parts of this. Since I have only read about 20% of the novel at this time, I can only hope he maintains his style and craft at this level.

The group of unlikely knights or gunslingers do very little in this novel. It is mainly a novel about Roland's background story. It's quite a good read. I'm glad I went through the boggy spots.

In the opening scene of Roland's story as a youth, we meet a witch that is to become involved with Roland as a young boy. Almost certainly not to Roland's benefit. In any case, it's just a marvelous scene:

... curled atop the box was a slim green snake. When she touched its back, its head came up. Its mouth yawned ina  silent hiss, displaying four pairs of fangs--two on top, two on the bottom.

 She took the snake up, crooning to it. As she brought its flat face close to her own, its mouth yawned wider and its hissing became audible. She opened her own mouth; from between her wrinkled gray lips she poked the yellowish, bad-smelling mat of her tongue. Two drops of poison--enough to kill an entire dinner-party, if mixed in the punch--fell on it. She swallowed, feeling her mouth and throat and chest burn, as if with strong liquor. For a moment the room swam out of focus, and she could hear voices murmuring in the stenchy air of the hut--the voices of those she called  "the unseen friends."

I would have preferred King to use a young woman, or younger, or of some average age. I've never been a big fan of coupling ugliness and wickedness together. Charlize Theron, for example, made a great wicked witch in Snow White and the Huntsman. For her alone was that movie worth watching. The wicked witches as haughty, powerful women, are a favorite of mine.

Another example of how King makes these brilliant flourishes that add a wonderful spice or flavor to his narrative:

(she) looked into the glass once more. The horse and its interesting young rider were gone. The rose light was gone as well. It was now just a dead glass ball she held, its only light a reflection borrowed from the moon.

Now that I'm further along, almost half way through the novel, it has become ponderous again. Some tired cliches about purity and virginity and golden yellow hair. The sick (perverted) old man is hot for the 16 year old girl, Susan, and has a hall pass from his wife on her since he's wanting a child and his wife can't (or he can't, but the narration suggests the problem is with her). Since the sick perverted man is also a powerful mayor, this is going to cause a major problem between Roland and the people.

I guess it's still in vogue today: writers who paint in moral black-and-white and rarely shades of gray.

Also, despite King being the sort of writer who doesn't mind saying fuck, when it comes to romance scenes, he's about as graphic as a cheap Harlequin novel. I guess the difference might be that in the Harlequin novel the scenes are not rape. Or are they? I have actually never read more than a few pages of a romance novel.

 His eyes were bulging, there were big drops of sweat on his forehead in spite of the room's coolness, and his tongue was actually hanging out, like a dog's on a  hot day. Revulsion rose in her throat like the taste of rotten food. She tried to pull away and his hands tightened their hold, pulling her against him. His knuckles cracked obscenely, and now she could feel the hard lump at the center of him.

He paints a singularly lecherous man who can barely contain himself for his desire of this young flesh. King can't even say cock this time. It's the hard lump at the center of him. What happened to you when you wrote this part, King?

Fortunately, the drudgery of this bland, two dimensional romance, is short enough to endure, and the narrative gets much better and easier to stomach.

Another few negative criticisms I have of King's narrative: First, his treatment of the veritable descendants of Mexicans. He refers to their language as 'crunk.' I guess it's the old cliché, right? Lots of movies were nasty towards Mexicans and (sic) Indians. Fortunately, I suppose, King left the Native Americans alone.

The next criticism I have comes from my feminist side: he refers to the virginity of Susan, Roland's love interest as something that makes her honest:

... calling her as she had all those months ago, on the night Susan had come to her hut to be proved honest.

I wonder if King would say that this is the language of the setting, or the perspective. Or if he just thinks a woman who is not a virgin is not honest? Or is King just trying to reflect the general sexist racist stereotypes for this one book? Or is King himself not racist and sexist, only his writing? Fortunately I'm white, so it's easier for me to swallow. If I was a minority maybe I'd walk away from King and his novel. Or maybe I'm too PC. Most of the time it's OK, and only mildly detracts from the story.

The Waste Lands, Stephen King

Image from BetterworldBooks.com

The Waste Lands is book #3 of 8 of The Dark Tower series. Thus far, this is the longest of the three and stands at about 500 pages. I have to say, the first half of the book drags. There are entire sections which go on about breakfast without having any particular purpose. There are also a lot of typos, wrong words, and misspellings. I think the proofreader of this book was definitely out to lunch for the ebook version. I don't know how the paperback fared. You can buy it for your Kindle or a paper version of it on Amazon.com or the audiobook from Betterworldbooks.com. You can buy the paperback version, plus shipping, for 6 cents on Amazon. The Kindle version is a bit over $10. For a library binding it's almost $20.

There are other things that bother me about this book. The female character, Detta/Odetta/Susannah, is so far very unimportant for this book. I can't help but wonder if she was added as an afterthought. (sic) Let's just add an amputee woman and a black one at that and we've got the minorities covered. Through the first half of the book (where I'm at now as I'm writing my thoughts) she is little more than a severe hobble on the questing group's journey. The way she talks seems so cliche stereotyping. The biggest thing that she did for the group thus far was allow herself to get semi-raped by some kind of ghost so that her 'white bread' boyfriend can make the spell that brings Jake out of his world and into Roland's world. Once Jake has become a part of the group, she says almost nothing and has become even less satisfying as a character. He might as well have written in that there was a big rock that has to be carried to the Dark Tower.

As I am better than half way through the book, now, the pace is picking up and it's getting more interesting. The typos and wrong words are a bit more common, but the narrative is more interesting from about the time that Jake started getting written in and has continued to improve since then. I hope it continues to be at least this good, or better, or I may never finished The Dark Tower series.

Now I have completed book #3. The pace, indeed, did sustain itself from the half to the end and left us at a cliffhanger. While I remained unimpressed with Susannah's character, the horror of this post apocalyptic city is an excellent backdrop to the horror of a powerful computer which, over the course of 800 years of decline, has gone mad. The people of Lud are half rotted, much like the great bear from the previous volume, infected by some kind of poison (radiation is hinted at but never explicitly stated).

Will I jump into book four right away or do I need a break? Stay tuned...

The Drawing of the Three, Stephen King

It's not possible to get a second hand Kindle edition version of this book as it is the paperback version. Therefore, either read the paperback version, or pay the $8.99/$10.60 (I think one price is US and the other Canadian), available on Amazon.com.

First off, I was disappointed in the introduction. It's the same introduction as the first novel in this eight volume octology. Having started the third volume, I can say that the third is the same as the first as well. Why couldn't you write a different introduction for the other books, Stephen?

Having completed volume two, I can honestly say that King has failed to match Tolkien as he had hoped. However, this is nothing to be ashamed of. King pumped these out at breakneck speed while Tolkien made it his life's work. That said, I burned through this book's four hundred some odd pages (according to Google) in less than two days. I don't know if that's a record for me, but it might be. In other words, it was a gripping novel that is hard to put down.

Our protagonist, Roland, is hunting down three people who are to help him in his quest for the Dark Tower. There is some kind of door that appears magically out of nowhere. When he opens it, he is able to control the consciousness of whomever the door is set to.

 Roland goes to the beach and suffers an encounter with massively large lobsters King calls lobstrosities. The fight results in the loss of two fingers from his right hand and results in a deadly bacterial infection.

The first he picks up is a drug addict, Eddie. He saves him from prison, is instrumental in delivering him from the drug lord who had conscripted him for trafficking cocaine, via airplane, into the US. He is a heroin addict and a bad junkie. His brother is worse. However, in the end the drug kills him. He crosses into Roland's world and helps him in his quest. He brings with him some drugs, but it's not enough to completely destroy the bacteria in his system.

The second person is a black lady named Odetta. She is very tough but has a split personality that is a kind of Jekyll and Hyde. One is a deadly killer and the other a highly educated lovely lady. Eddie falls in love with her, but she is difficult to manage because of her second personality and the fact that her legs were cut off and consequently she needs to be pushed around in a wheelchair. However, that does not mean she is helpless. She is very dangerous.

The last is Jack Mort. But rather than bring Jack back, he uses Jack to rob a store of antibiotics and get some ammunition. He never thinks to get other firearms for his new colleagues. At this time, however, Odetta (good)/Detta (bad) is in bad mode and takes hostage of Eddie. Jack Mort is the man who is responsible for her condition. He is a psychopath who pushes people into traffic, subway trains, and drops bricks on random people. Odette/Detta was one of the victims twice--once as a girl he dropped a brick on, and once as a woman whom he pushed in front of a train which took her legs from her; as was the boy, Jake, from volume one of the series. Therefore, the gunslinger has no pity for him and hates him and subjects him to considerable pain before forcing him to kill himself by jumping in front of a subway train.

While the gunslinger is in that other world, Odetta/Detta has mercilessly tied Eddie up for the lobstrosities to eat up.

Once he does that, Odetta/Detta become a single character, thereafter referred mostly to as Susannah, becomes their friend and ally. She saves Eddie and they become buddies. Roland brings back a lot of drugs to take care of his infection and ammunition. Roughly at this point The Drawing of the Three comes to an end.

It's a very enjoyable story and King has kept me glued to the pages. Some other notes: the style between volume one and two has shifted. Both metaphors and similes, forced and brilliant, ar eno longer present. So, I missed the moments of brilliant description and was grateful for the absence of the forced ones which pained me on occasion. I also didn't catch any run-on sentences. I think he hired a good proofreader for this volume!

The Gunslinger, Stephen King

I think I remember reading this book a long time ago. The title is familiar. But that's it. Maybe I read Amazon.com. This is just the first of eight in a series. So, that means to go from point a to point z courtesy of Amazon, you're looking at about $80. Mass market paperback, on the other hand, will set you back by about $0.51. It might cost the environment a few more kg in CO2, but that's not his or his publisher's nightmare, is it? I guess it was something else. Unfortunately, the only way to get this book for free or at a reasonable price is to either a) get lucky and borrow it, b) someone throws it away and you take it, c) steal it from friend, stranger, or foe, or d) buy it second hand from a second hand bookstore. Why there is a premium on an old book going through Amazon is beyond me. For $10.46 you can get your Kindle version.

I am reading not the original version, but the version that has been revised since the completion of the octology. The changes, he mentions in the introduction that he wanted to do an epic series. This is his opus magnum.

Stephen King is a master of narrative. No sane mind, and probably no insane mind, would dispute this opinion having read his books. He really owns his genre.

His similes and metaphors are frequent, and occasionally real gems. "A gunslinger knows pride, that invisible bone that keeps the neck stiff." There are several other gems that I really liked. Other times a few of the metaphors seem forced. I didn't record those instances and I'm not going to dig for them. So, my impression could be wrong and maybe I was just in 'a mood'.

The story is that the gunslinger, named Roland Deschain, is out for revenge against "The Man in Black," I think because of something the man did to his mother a decade or two earlier. His own father had been a gunslinger. He is said to be not as fast or as smart as the other gunslinger students, but his teacher, Cort, tells him that he's the best student he's had in a long time. He is described as slow and deliberate. 

From izquotes.com

Eventually he does track down the man in black. Or, perhaps it can be more accurate to say that the man in black leads him to this final destination. Along the way he runs into a small village where he is set upon by a witch and all those who are under her spell. In all there are some 70 men, women, and children, who all try to kill the gunslinger. But he kills them all. In the pages of killing, I like this line: 

She was large and fat and known to the patrons of Sheb's as Aunt Mill. The gunslinger blew her backwards and she landed in a whorish sprawl, her skirt rucked up between her thighs.

I am surprised, however, to see runon sentences in his book. The one above is not the only one I spotted. Great descriptions, but always surprised to see stuff like that considering he was an English university grad, school teacher, and has an editor to ferret out such things.

After he's done killing the congregation of the witch,

They trailed in a twisting, zigzagging path from the back door of the barber shop to where he stood.

There is even a lovely illustration of the bodies lying in zigzag formation.

Eventually he does get to the man in black. He wakes up ten years older in the mountains after his conversation with the man, or palaver as King likes to put it, and the man in black is a skeleton. How this comes to pass or why is unknown. It is here that King leaves off volume one of eight in The Dark Tower series.

On Writing: a Memoir of the Craft, Stephen King

I have read some Stephen King books. Granted, probably not in the last twenty years. I'm not really sure why, as he's an excellent modern writer. The copy I got is a PDF online for free. I can't help but think it's not authorized by Stephen King considering that the distributor is located in Russia. If you want to go ahead and pay $10.52 for the digital version on Amazon.com, I'm sure King and his publisher would be delighted. Reading the PDF on my Kindle, however, comes at a cost: the text is extremely small. It's some kind of revenge, I'm sure.

What I was expecting: a dry book about grammar or a personal system about how he churns out his popular fiction. But what I got instead is an autobiographical account of writing in his life. Most of it feels like a forward at this point, despite the PDF having three already. Thus far, I have been highly entertained. There is something about King's ability to turn a phrase or frame an experience or scene which is fresh and raw while maintaining a high degree of quality. Perhaps I have been spending too much time with the literary 'greats' like Charles Dickens and not enough time with contemporary greats like Stephen King.

The first thing from the book, aside from being impressed with his style, what really poked me in the eye was that his mother was his first and biggest fan. When he wrote, she bought copies. She encouraged him in a way that must have been vitally important and it makes me hope I remember this well enough for when (or if) I have my own little brood: rather than giving him money to do things he does not like or want to do: dishes, taking out garbage, or other typical chores, she gives him money to do things that he does love to do. Encourage and foster a love for doing something rather than putting value on base chores which no one can love. What a remarkably simple but powerful way to build King's self confidence and love for what he really loves. There's no battle of wills between a reluctant parent and hopeful writer, or apathy (perhaps a shade worse than an angry parent, since at least an angry parent can become an actor in some imaginary tale while apathy is never very interesting).

On dealing with his first serious critic, "...in my heart I stayed ashamed. I kept hearing Miss Hisler asking why I wanted to waste my time, why I wanted to write junk." (p. 47) Why is it teachers are usually at the forefront of tearing apart student ambitions?

"Life isn't a support-system for art. It's the other way around." (p. 98)

I remember in my youth, perhaps late teens, my opinion of Stephen King changing for the negative. It was not because of some poorly written novel or an insult carried to me through his words. It was this series of short parts of a book that seemed to be dished out in such a way as to maximize the cost of what would otherwise be a normal novel of normal cost. Perhaps being poor, I felt like it was a slap in the face of fans who were financially challenged. Since then I haven't read anything of his. So, this book really is the first I've read of his in more than twenty years. Time flies! I think he's been buying $25 novels for so long that he's mostly forgotten his nickle and dime days.

This book makes me think of my own writing journey: a failure, not a success, naturally. The closest I've come is four illustrated books with the originals where? I have no clue: perhaps in a garbage bag well taken care of by a cousin. Perhaps at the bottom of some landfill never to be found again. So it seems I must begin again. I'm forty. I guess it's not too late. But the burning desire to make it happen isn't as keen as it once was, and what's worse, the faith in myself for making it happen is gone.

You may wonder where plot is in all this.  The answer--my answer, anyway--is nowhere. I won't try to convince you that I've never plotted any more than I'd try to convince you that I've never told a lie, but I do both as infrequently as possible. I distrust plot for two reasons: first, because our lives are largely plotless, even when you add in all our reasonable precautions and careful planning: and second, because I believe plotting and the spontaneity of real creation aren't compatible. (p. 156)

 I think this is an interesting point. Not because it's right or because it's wrong. Because it's both and neither. Considering the huge collection of material related to Tolkien's LOTR. Tolkien's son, Christopher, discovered a huge trunk filled with notes, sketches, and the like, of the most remarkable fantasy fiction I have ever read. I am not trying to say that King is inferior at all. Far from it. King is a fantastic writer, but more importantly, he is different. He brings a different approach to story telling than Tolkien. OK, I do like Tolkien better than King. I also like pizza better than spaghetti. But it doesn't mean I want to eat pizza every day. In fact, it's probably not great for my health. I'm not saying that King is good for my health, my point is that diversity in diet is important both for the sanity of my palette and my health. King is not junk. He is an excellent writer and probably ranks in the top 20 or 30 authors of the 20th century in my estimation (I really should make a list). I understand that Rowling's Harry Potter series were well plotted before they were written, but I will freely admit that I would choose King of Rowling. Not that my opinion is worth two cents to anyone but myself, but the point is that his style is a part of what makes his writing unique. And his style doesn't necessarily mean that people who plot are going to be better than him. Let's just say that some that plot are better, while others not.

... stories are found things, like fossils in the ground... (p. 156)

  This may be true for King. But of course, some people are much better at finding fossils than others. Furthermore, many people have a great deal of training and art behind their digging. But that might very well be his point. He finds the fossils, can recognize them, and hacks away at them using his particular style.

He avoids adverbs. It makes me wonder how often adverbs show themselves in my own writing. I know they're there, but certainly not so many that it would harm his sensibilities in any way.

There is a section that is devoted to the typical how to and how not to become some kind of writer. This is the kind of book I was expecting. Another one of those. Fortunately it is short and it isn't too painful: mostly a rehash of the same stuff that I have read many times before. Perhaps the kind of kick in the pants to get me back to the habit. Submitting these stories there: that's the devil that's always plagued me. I hate submitting to anything.

King ends off describing the near life-ending accident he had. He is both lucky and unlucky. He is lucky that the man who hit him stopped and helped him, waited with him, while help was on its way. He is unlucky that the man hit him. The man who almost killed him is also the man who saved his life. Why did he stop? Why did he help him? Was he afraid of a murder charge or was he genuinely more concerned about King getting through the accident alive? I can't blame King for not seeing that. If I had gone through the same experience, it is unlikely that I would be objective. Had Bryan Smith been one of those actual King villains, surely he would have taken him home and mended him just well enough to keep him alive.

Honestly, this is the best writer's book I've ever read. It really does belong on the top of those types of books. Not because it's going to help me become a successful writer, but because for the time I spent reading it, I kind of got a share in the feeling of what it must be like to be a successful writer. It's that telekinetic connection he wrote of I guess.

I hope I will spend the time to do the assignment he mentioned. I will do it. Or die procrastinating on it.