My dad does backstage work at various venues in Seattle. Once, the stool provided for Lyle to sit on on-stage wasn’t up to his liking and he threw a huge hissy fit and made everyone leave the theater to stand out in the alley. In the rain. *
I’m a bit surprised by this. I knew Lyle in college and he was always a nice guy. We weren’t friends, but my roommates and I often went to his shows when he was performing back then (late '70s). Sometimes we were the only people in the audience. We met his parents, very nice people from Klein, Texas.
We worked together briefly on the college newspaper and I even sat next to him at graduation and we had a great time. What I remember about Lyle was he was soft-spoken and all the girls loved him. I never could figure out why, except he was very charming and nice.
I haven’t spoken to him in almost 30 years, but I do know a friend that ran into him on a plane and said he was the same-old Lyle. For what it’s worth.
Johnny Bench (HoF, I think, catcher for the Reds) is notorious here in Cincy for being a real dick. When my brother was a kid he was at some celebrity golf outing that Bench was also at. He tried to get an autograph and Bench wouldn’t give one and was apparently a shithead about it.
And NOW I know what that guy has seemed so familiar to me. He kinda looks like his dad–not the hair, but the expression. IMO, Jacobson always looked like Alfred E. Newman of MAD fame.
I was with P.N. Elrod a few years ago when she went into a bookstore and signed all the copies of her books they had on the shelf. She came prepared with her own roll of stickers. After doing her little stealth signing, she let the employees know she’d been there.
When Goosebumps was at its height, RL Stine used a lot of ghost authors who signed “I will not in any way reveal that I ever wrote for this series” and of course they were completely uncredited. A couple of name authors who have become famous since have admitted to writing for the series without naming names, just “a children’s horror author who produced several books per month at one time”.
One of my professors from library school (who’s apparently heavily involved in the children’s publishing world) said that Stine is the only book-a-month author that actually writes them all himself.
Where did you read he didn’t do all the writing himself?
(shrug) He’s a writer who spends much of his time alone. Good social skills are not part of the job description. I assume he was caught off-guard by IW’s request.
It’s not unprecedented. Walter B Gibson wrote nearly all of “The Shadow” novels, sometimes two of them a month. And it’s not like Stine was punching out “War and Peace” every month. I suppose writing to a formula makes it easy.
Oh, please. The laughter is not “understandable”; if the incident happened as related here, it’s fucking rude. If a stop in a sparsely populated area is not in the cards, there are ten thousand more polite ways to respond. If he chose not to give a polite response, that makes him a fucking ass. And I don’t buy your last comment either.
> When Goosebumps was at its height, RL Stine used a lot of ghost authors who
> signed “I will not in any way reveal that I ever wrote for this series” and of
> course they were completely uncredited. A couple of name authors who have
> become famous since have admitted to writing for the series without naming
> names, just “a children’s horror author who produced several books per month
> at one time”.
So is that why some websites claim that Garry Wills co-wrote one of the Goosebumps books?
