stephen king c/d?

Is that porn?

still muddling through the last short story collection

I downloaded his entire oeuvre. Woohoo. Mainly interested in his seventies work.

that last story in just after sunset. oh my god

Man, I have no memories of posting to this thread over the years.

Still, just finished the Tommyknockers for the first time. Why does it seem that every King book needs a massively high body count, and a climax involving the hero suffering some massive injury described in high detail?

messiah figures?

I just recommended the shining to one of my esl students cause it's you know, interesting, but hen he showed me the first page and I had no idea he is relatively idiosyncratic as a writer (for an esl student anyway)

Lunch at the Gotham Cafe is dumb, but I did enjoy the description of the maitre d

Stephen King On Writing was very good. I've never been that big of a fan of his, but have always been interested in how the dude sits at a typewriter and constantly churns out four novels a year. Sure cocaine's a helluva drug, but to retain focus and a narrative through all of that is impressive.

He goes through step-by-step how to do it. It's not easy, it doesn't sound fun, but it makes sense. Spend three hours a day writing. Do that every day for three months. When you're done, don't read it for another month or two. Then spend another three months editing it.

He goes into more detail about the process, including where he thinks your desk should be in the room, how to find an agent, staying away from Tom Swifties. But it was a very plain-spoken how-to manual.

I'm just too lazy to sit around, imagining what a rat's tail snapping about in the nest of my throat would feel like and being bothered to sit down and put it in words from 4 - 7 am every day for a winter.

'On Writing' was an excellent read, either as biography or as manual (and I've no intention of ever writing tbh, it's and interesting sunject though)

^ this is why i've no intention of ever writing

yeah, i love his writing about writing. it's what made me want to go back and read some of his stuff. my mom was a big fan (she always says her favorite people her age are david letterman, the clintons and stephen king, lol) and i read and enjoyed a lot of his stuff as a youth. i don't think his short stories are for me, tbh.

I can name television hosts and politicians my age, but I can't think of one popular author.

S/he's probably spending three hours a day on a messageboard somewhere.

Thought this was revived because of this:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/movies/2010/09/universal-nbc-stephen-king-the-dark-tower-ron-howard-brian-grazer.html

More hoohah:

http://www.deadline.com/2010/09/universal-lands-stephen-kings-the-dark-tower-and-plans-unprecedented-featurenetwork-tv-adaptation/

Looking back, the last Ron Howard movie I've seen was Willow. What does this portend?

Val Kilmer as Roland, obv.

Loved the first three Dark Towers, found the fourth a snooze and haven't read any of the others. Maybe I'll be arsed one day, but I think it would involve ploughing through the first four again. Or I could just wait for the films!

i don't think his short stories are for me, tbh.

I think a lot of his best writing is in novella/short story format. Maybe that's because his long stories all have, well, ridiculous mcguffins. Many of his short stories are similarly batshit horror, but there's real skill and change of pace in a lot of them too.

Yeah, I'd say that maybe 3 out of 4 times, King can really nail a short story.

my husband, a book reviewer among other things, is a serious SK fan (from youth, mostly) and he just had the chance to review SK's latest book of novellas. acc to him it's REALLY good. i didn't read it yet.

the short stories in night shift and skeleton key, and the novellas in different seasons are incredibly classic. i haven't read one of his novels since Needful Things (about which I remember nothing) and never got past book 3 of the dark tower. looking forward to films of it though. I suppose one day when I'm old and bored I'll go read all the rest of his crap.

i think nightmares and dreamscapes has a good mix, myself.

I also haven't read a new novel of his since Needful Things, but there's been a lot of talk elsewhere on here about Under the Dome.

i admire the dude's discipline and rod serling-esque endless fountain of ideas. they may not all be well executed, but he sure has a lot of ideas.

that's more than i can say for people who spend their entire careers writing novels about rich people's family problems.

! different spheres tbf

i may be the only person on the planet who was not disappointed with insomnia, but maybe since then his novels haven't rocked my world (tho now i think about hearts in atlantis had some great and poignant moments)

yeah, i know, i guess i prefer imagination to a microscope
or at least i do today

favourite stephen king shrt story nomination thread and poll y/n

quickest second thoughts ever actually. sod that for work

i found a 25 cent hardcover copy of "it" this weekend at a yard sale. i haven't read it since i was a kid; no idea what spurred me to pick it up (other than the price point was right). somehow i imagine myself reading this thing in about four days, despite it being one billion pages long, and still feeling like i got swindled give when i remember about his TERRIBLE, TERRIBLE ENDINGS. though having read about 150 pages so far, in a short burst yesterday afternoon, i will say the man knows how to keep those pages turning. it's kinda fun to read something so breezy (if that's even the right word for a book about a child-dismembering ick slumbering beneath middle america) for a change, even if king's prose is sometimes O_o'ingly bad.

given WHAT i remember about his endings.

classic of teenage classics, tho

that's more than i can say for people who spend their entire careers writing novels about rich people's family problems.

― The Great Jumanji, (La Lechera), Thursday, September 9, 2010 7:50 PM (3 weeks ago) Bookmark

amen

yeah! i remember reading IT in high school and being freaked out and disappointed at the turtle/universe ending

i actually kind of liked the mystical weirdness. the pre-teen gang bang was pretty O_O though, of course.

it was kind of exciting to read something known for being O_O scary. I remember the school librarian told me I was brave, that it gave him nightmares and I walked away thinking, "Ha ha, what a baby."

and it was awesome when my parent's friends would come over and say "What are you reading?" and I'd show them and they'd give me that "Um, you're not right in the head" look...or flip out at how big the book was.

I was okay with the ending. It made more sense once I read the Dark Tower stuff later down the line.

xp

ah thats the point of it he's on some magical innocence or prepuberty/puberty trip the whole book tbf

not sure *anything* made more sense to me once i'd finished the dark tower tbh

ha ha...yeah, I guess 'sense' is the wrong word. But all that turtle/universe stuff sort of tied it back to IT and other stuff and it was fun fitting all the parts together.

But he is definitely one for just going 'ah fuck it I don't know how to end this' and making up some weird alien thing/mystical thing that leaves you going, okay what just happened.

haha yeah i totally stole "it" from my mom's stash of "adult books" when i was 12ish or so.

stephen king certainly never shied away from depicting a wife-beating, i will say that.

the one thing i've totally loved about the book so far -- even if they're also overwritten, as per -- is the little "derry" interludes, presented as being taken from book about the town that one of the characters was writing. it really manages to get across this sense of unease about some basic evil running through a town's history without the overloaded sentiment of the actual narrative sections. like lovecraft but, you know, tighter. ("tighter" being something you could only say about king in comparison with lovecraft.)

pre-teen gang bang

http://s.ytimg.com/vi/hKUBTX9kKEo/0.jpg

somehow i imagine myself reading this thing in about four days

That's what I did when I first read it, during a few sick days from school. It's a page-turner, that's for sure, although after re-reading the unexpurgated "Stand" recently I went back and tried to re-read "It" and just kinda lost interest. Still love it, though; King has a way with that coming-of-age nostalgia stuff, like "Stand By Me" and "Christine," that works better for me than some of his other terrain.

Yeah he always seemed to write kids really well

i thought this was the thread where i went on about under the dome but i guess it isn't

I took It to the beach, found a comfortable spot to read, looked up a few hundred pages later and realized I had the worst sunburn of my life.

Sounds like It hurt!

would have been totally worth it if the ending were better

Yeah, ending of "It" is pretty much univerally derided. Also (unless you want to avoid spoilers of all sorts) the Wiki entry for the book has a hyper-detailed synopsis that had me LOLing at just how crazy MUCH plot he crammed into it.