I have it on good authority that the bunny slippers in question (though undoubtedly pink and extrememly fuzzy) are of the southern Lepus carnivorus breed, similar to the rabbit that attacked Jimmy Carter…
…but when you get blue, and you’ve lost all your dreams, there’s nothing like a campfire and a can of beans!
I like King’s stories a lot too. So does my younger daughter. Neither of us has been able to figure out why he lets the movie people butcher them so badly. Cujo, for example.
Opinions?
First time I read “Mine”, by Robert McCammon, I thought that maybe King had sprung a new persona. Good story.
Peace,
mangeorge
I only know two things;
I know what I need to know
And
I know what I want to know
Mangeorge, 2000
Mangeorge – but sometimes the movies are better – like Shawshank and Misery, and Dead Zone.
It’s like the Elvis thing, especially his movies. Talented people, especially when they get famous and successful, need someone who can keep them grounded, rein them in when they get to thinking they can do anything and people will love it.
King’s needed a good editor for a long time. We know that Darabont can handle King’s prison stories (shoot, there were just the two, I think) – but now he needs someone with half a brain to put the stories of his everyday fears on film.
Or just forget the movies altogether. That’d be okay by me.
I agree, Auntie. Misery was great, although it rode heavily on Kings story and Kathy Bates’ excellent acting. What’s-his name wasn’t bad, either. 
Guess I shouldn’t grumble about a couple of stinkers. “Christine” was another stinker as a movie, in my opinion. Should have been easy to make that one.
Peace,
mangeorge
BTW, Auntie. Ever been to his web “presence”?
Pretty cool.
Peace,
mangeorge
Yeah – it’s really improved over the last year or so.
So many writers have websites now – Joe Lansdale’s is good too – his isn’t quite as commercial as King’s – more focused on the writing.
George R. R. Martin sells his old books on his site – and answers his mail, as does Dan Simmons. Guess there’s an advantage to not being quiteas popular as King.
Mostly because he doesn’t have the power? Even the hugest, most important, best-selling writers don’t have much clout in Hollywood. You can sell the rights to your book or not, and sometimes you even get a choice of who to sell it to, but, after that, it’s mostly not in your hands.
And let’s not forget Maximum Overdrive the wonderful Stephen King movie scripted and directed by the man himself…
…but when you get blue, and you’ve lost all your dreams, there’s nothing like a campfire and a can of beans!
Another author who is big on pen names is Dean R. Koontz. I like how he gives his pen names different personalities. For example, his pen name Leigh Nichols is a female, and all of her central characters are female. David Axton (another pen name) is a British spy story writer. He has about seven or eight different pen names in all, and most of the stories he’s written under pen names have eventually been re-released under his own name in paperback.
David
Guy Propski writes:
> SF writer Philip Jose Farmer used to write
> under several diffent pen names as a way
> of getting around writer’s block.
Excuse me, but since when has Farmer ever suffered from writer’s block? Except for a few things written under the name of characters in other people works, which was done just as a clever way to find new material, Farmer has never written under pseudonyms.
RealityChuck writes:
> Most often, they don’t want their identity
> known to the general public, either due to
> privacy concerns (e.g, James Tiptree,
> Jr.) . . .
Was that really the reason that Alice Sheldon used the named “James Tiptree, Jr.”? I thought it was more a desire to not have her readers stereotype her work because she was a woman. Once her name was discovered though, she didn’t make a big deal of it.
He further writes:
> Some authors use pen names because their
> actual name is difficult to remember or
> pronounce. Somtow P. Sutchuritkul writes
> horror as S.P. Somtow for this reason.
Sucharitkul started out publishing his books by his full name, but then an editor suggested that he put the name “S. P. Somtow” on one of them. Apparently this increased sales, so he’s used the name since, even in re-issues of his earlier work. The editor probably suggested the name “S. P. Somtow” because it disguised his Thai ancestry. Probably most readers of his books assume that Somtow is Russian or something vaguely Eastern European.
He further writes:
> I know of a couple of cases (C.J. Cherryh
> and Lawrence Watt-Evans) where an author
> used a pen name because the editor of
> their first novel insisted on it.
Carolyn Cherry was going to use either that name or simply “C. J. Cherry”, but the editor thought that it sounded like the author of a romance novel. She (Cherryh) decided to just add an “h” to the end of the name to make it sound exotic.
Lawrence Evans (whose middle name was Watt) said that his editor said that he might be confused with some other author with the same name, so he hyphenated his middle name with his last name.
I’ve specifically asked Somtow, Cherryh, and Watt-Evans about this, incidentally.
He further writes:
> Some prolific authors don’t want to flood
> the market with their books (like
> Bachman/King and Asimov/Paul French).
I think that what Asimov has written about the name “Paul French” is that he didn’t want this series (for adolescents) too strongly associated with his adult books.
mangeorge writes:
> Neither of us has been able to figure out
> why he lets the movie people butcher them
> so badly.
Perhaps because they’re intrinsically undoable as films? Believe it or not, some novels and stories don’t naturally translate to film.
Have people considered that King may be suffering from what I call the Jordan/Brooks syndrome? Why would Michael Jordan want to spend any time on being a minor league baseball player? Why would Garth Brooks want to spend any time on being a second-rate rock star like Chris Gaines? Apparently when someone so completely dominates their field, like Jordan, Brooks, and King did, it gets boring. It’s natural for them to wonder if they could do well in some other field.
Well, Sheldon was an intensely private person, so she didn’t want readers/editors/whoever knowing much of anything about her. She’s written that she had planned to have a new pseudonym on each batch of stories she sent out – on the assumption that she wouldn’t get published for a while – but I believe four out of the initial batch of five stories were bought, so she was stuck as Tiptree.
Afterwards, she did go out of her way to keep the pseudonym secret (not even her agent knew). The secret only came out when “Tiptree” mentioned the death of “his” mother in a letter. With all of the previously known facts about “Tiptree’s” mother, a fan was able to track down the mother, who had only one child: Alice Sheldon.
Sheldon complained that the female “Tiptree” of the second half of her career didn’t win as many awards and wasn’t thought of as being as special as the mysterious male “Tiptree” of her first decade of writing. Part of that may be the letdown of having a mystery solved, part the natural progression of a writer from “new and exciting” to “established,” but part probably was a kind of sexism.
Even after she was “outed,” Sheldon wasn’t the kind of social animal many SF writers are. And what kind of “big deal” can one make when one’s cover is blown? There’s no way to put things back the way they were.
The main reasons for a pseudonym in the first place were 1) privacy and 2) she assumed it would be several years before she had publishable stories and so she wouldn’t have to worry until then about using her real name. But the choice of a male pseudonym was clearly not coincidental.
…but when you get blue, and you’ve lost all your dreams, there’s nothing like a campfire and a can of beans!
Wendall Wagner:
As a matter of fact, I believe that many if not all of King’s stories could be done into movies, and done quite well at that.
If someone would take the time to pare down his writing a bit (he admits himself that he gets a little word happy), and then take the time to take the pared down story and turn it into a respectable (follow the story closely enough that the man doesn’t have to sue to have his name taken off it as he did with Lawnmower Man) script, then the movies would be absolute hits.
He has a gift for writing, and part of that gift is the ability to write it so well that while you read, the story runs through your head like a movie. I know I could turn some of his stories into excellent scripts, but I don’t have the time, money, or connections to do so. But I know it could be done. I also think the script writer needs to be a King fan (or atleast appreciate the story), and he or she needs to work closely with the author. The person who wrote the story is the only person who can say “No, that part is important to the storyling, and that part could be cut without damaging the tale I was trying to tell.”
Oh, and one more thing. Stephen King does not only tell scary/gory stories. If you look closely at his stories, he almost always addresses larger concerns as well. For instance: Dolores Claiborne and Rose Madder were both about spouse abuse, and DC was also about child molestation and the damage it causes; Insomnia dealt with the abortion issue; The Green Mile with the death penalty; etcetera. Read his books, and I guarantee that you will find very few that don’t address an important issue atleast to some small degree.
“I celebrate myself, and sing myself, and what I assume you shall assume, for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” --Whitman