A friend sent me an email asking me what I knew about Sherlock Holmes fandom. 'Cause, really, you can call it the Baker Street Irregulars and have fancy symposia and analysis etc., but you're all fanboys, gentlement. So anyway, I got the email, I turned my deskchair around, considered my Sherlock Holmes shelf, and then wrote a three-page email in return giving the history of the Irregulars, Baring-Gould, Nicholas Myers, Conan Doyle's son's anthology of stories, and the anthology that includes a Holmes story written by Stephen King, etc.
I felt like such a scholar.
One of my friends has been known to say that if vampires are proven to be real, the zombie uprising happens, or something from a plot of SPN happens, I'm the first person she's calling because I've got the research material to help us.
Cool, Connie
At one time in my life, I was quite up in that sort of stuff, (I guess it was my early fandom, but I wouldn't have known to say that.)
I don't get into it much now but I'm kind of stoked there's another movie coming up.
I am now about 1/3 of the way through Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian, and it's the most Buffista-esque adventure. They keep leaping onto trains traveling through old European cities, hoping to find vital information at the library. Plus they're hunting the legend of Vlad "The Impaler" Tepes. I keep thinking, if Buffy had been the giant brain daugher of a diplomat...
I liked it very much, although the ending was a bit disappointing. Of course, it didn't help that I found a bat in my basement while I was reading it.
I always felt Stephen King was particularly attuned to the cruel of class, and how that fuels sexism, and he proves that in his review of this Raymond Carver bio.
(If you are a Carver fan and can't enjoy a writer after knowing they did horrible things, then I would recommend against reading it, because - when he was an alcoholic - he did some horrible things.)
Why do I read Candace Bushnell? Why?
Because for a while, it's all sexy fun, and then sometime in the middle, I want these shoe-fetishizing wenches to get sent to some North Korean work collective and never screw again.
Hm. But King is also pretty focused on how editors are evil, which... well. I suppose he would think that. There's a piece about the unedited Carver stories here which I think is a little more nuanced:
[link]
Lish's editing of Carver's stories is a pretty complex story and not about the usual writer/editor relationship. It was (I think) an abusive relationship and Lish went well beyond editing into rewriting and changing the meaning and style of Carver's work. It was driven by Lish's ego not to serve Carver's work. And Carver was in the very vulnerable position being late into his career and desperately needing a break.
Yeah, that's pretty twisted.
But I can't help wondering what things his wife might have had to say as well, if she wasn't his pack mule so often. Of course, she might not have had much interest in stories at all, but even still I think some women still find a guy who lives out their outer life for them, not as much as in the fifties, but still.
Stephen King considering writing 'Shining' sequel:
According to the author, the second novel would center on Danny Torrance, the young boy from the original story with the gift (or curse) of being able to communicate clairvoyantly with ghosts, and who is now an appropriately aged 40-year-old. All these years after being tormented by the spiritual inhabitants of the Overlook Hotel and his father’s alcoholism/homicidal rage, Danny is now working at a hospice using his supernatural powers for palliative purposes. King even offered a tentative title: Doctor Sleep.
I don't know how I feel about this! In any case, he's just tossing the idea around and may not actually write it.
The comments are pretty amusing, though. My favorite is this criticism of the original headline:
"Stephen King to write possible Shining sequel" makes it sound like he's writing something and even while writing it he can't decide whether it's the sequel to the Shining or not.
