4 posts tagged “stephen king”
I'd planned on giving this thing some attention on the 16th, as that would have been three months (Oi.) since I actually wrote in here. Unfortunately the 16th came and went in a flurry of Wii playing, snow, and God knows what else. Work, probably. I put in some overtime (well, over my scheduled time--I came in at just under 40 hours for the week) at the end of the week because they needed some stuff done, and for whatever reason when I hit 40 hours a week the odds of me writing in here decrease dramatically, rather like they did in November. Probably has something to do with the fact that I'm sleeping until the last possible minute, hurrying off to work, then coming back and crashing as soon as I can so I can get the most rest possible to get ready for another full day of work. And weekends were really all about laundry, dishes, and just trying to deflect the craziness of the week past and the coming week as well.
So anyway. Yeah. I guess there really isn't any particular need to apologize, but of course I still feel apologetic.
Life has been more or less ordinary for me, but for whatever reason I missed all the snow-flying months, so perhaps that's a little to blame as well. There's still the occasional chance of flurries on the radar, but after the drenching rain we've been getting since last night just after I clocked out at work, I think we're moving more-or-less smoothly into springtime, which is definitely foryay. Sunshine and warmth will be most lovely to see again, I think.
It occurs to me that I probably can't even possibly log everything that I've read over the past three months, but of course I'll give it a try. Some things stood out, like P.D. James' Children of Men, and Christopher Moore's You Suck (for which I had to read Bloodsucking Fiends to keep up), as well as getting through Terry Pratchett's Tiffany Aching books. One that I've been trying to get myself into lately is a book called The Dark Mirror, but I've had it out of work for a week and managed to only hack out about a hundred pages or so. I want to read it, but it just hasn't grabbed me yet.
Stephen King's Dark Tower books are getting a comic series to match, but it turns out that my bookstore won't be carrying them. Le sigh. I was actually kind of looking forward to a comic book that I was really interested in.
I interviewed for an administrative assistant position a couple of weeks ago. Apparently it didn't go so well, despite my interview which seemed rather promising. I suppose we can't always get what we want, but boy would I like to get out of the bookstore. It's not so much any one thing in particular that I'm tired of so much as I'm just tired. This time of year the schedule's awfully lean, and we really could use a bit more money (who couldn't?) but I'm really hesitant to go to, say, Evan's job, which he really doesn't like but makes decent money--enough money, in fact, that he ends up kind of stuck unless he wants to downgrade his income--something we can't afford right now. Meh.
The real impetus for this post was realizing that my totally anti-social best friend, J, is now maintaining a journal. It's a writing journal, and she doesn't have much of the kind of personal posting that I'm much more apt to be making, but there's no reason that I can't do this if she can. So I'm hoping to get this thing moving again, because I think it really is a part of my life that I want to continue. Just not when I work a lot. Or when it snows. Ahem.
Anyway. It's good to be back (I hope), and here's to keeping on keeping on.
As another effort towards getting back on track, I thought I'd post about the book I (finally!) finished yesterday.
Yes, more Stephen King. Shock and awe, I know. I actually read The Stand before this, mostly because of its correlation to Lost, and while it was kind-of-sort-of interesting, I found myself skipping over a lot of parts just to get to what I felt like was the meat of the story. I'm sure I missed a few important things here and there, and my only excuse is that there was so much story that by the end I just wanted to know what happened. Didn't help that it was the "complete and restored" edition where King put back in a good portion of the stuff that had been taken out when the piece was originally published. Anyway.
This one is new, brand new. It's taken me a week to plod through it, but I've also flipped through a few other things as well, and haven't read it on my lunch breaks or anything, just because the hardcover is a lot more bulky and difficult to deal with than a paperback that I can just tuck into my apron.
There were only a couple of particularly gory bits that made me uncomfortable, and in that, I suppose, it's somewhat uncharacteristic for the author. It seems that of all of King's work, I'm still kind of darting around the edges, reading the stuff that's pretty much not like all the other things in his repertoire. Also, of course, I wondered if the "dead author" aspect would connect to Dark Tower at all, and I guess the answer is not really, though the Long Boy kind of reminded me of the thing that chased Roland, Susannah, and Oy through the dark train stations/Dogan/whatever that was (it's been a while, or certainly seems it).
I really like the idea of Boo'ya Moon, and the 'pool where we go down to drink' that I think most serious writers and/or readers will identify with. King does tend to write about writers a lot, but I suppose there is some truth to the old adage, "write what you know." Also, I think almost dying after getting hit by a car is probably enough to make anyone think about the what-ifs and all the possibilities, let alone someone who's probably got one of the most vivid, unpredictable imaginations out there. Naturally, it makes you wonder just how much of the story he relates to himself, how much he tortures himself to face whatever it is in him that brings out the stories he writes.
Enough to make any writer think, really. The pool is an interesting metaphor, if nothing else. Evan has a copy of On Writing laying around here somewhere. I'll probably pick it up just to see if I can draw any lines between the two.
All in all, I enjoyed the book, and thankfully had enough reasons to pace myself without racing to the end. What I didn't have, to my relief, were nightmares, which this particular author tends to give me. Bleh. Since most people probably haven't read it yet, I don't really want to run the risk of spoiling, but needless to say, it's worth a look.
Not really much else to say this morning, except that I'm looking forward to my Thursday off, even if it does mean I have to work on Saturday. Right now I'm just wondering what they're going to do with my schedule next week...
Last night's dream, or at least, the dream I was having when I woke up, involved visiting the house that my grandparents lived in when I was a little kid, and also the actor Alan Cumming having decided to be a woman instead of a man. I wouldn't be completely surprised if that was the case, but a quick visit to his website shows that it hasn't happened yet, at least.
Night before last I dreamed that my pregnant co-worker is going to have a girl. I told a couple people at work, but not her, as I didn't want to be right and spoil things or be wrong and be disappointing. Plus, even if she does want to find out when she can, that's still a couple months away. Anyway.
Lost premiered last night, and as promised, the first five minutes were especially wtf-worthy. The fact that two different Stephen King books popped up is still tugging at my mind, but given that they were the old covers, I can't tell what books they were. A lot of folks have been suggesting that they're part of the Dark Tower series and everyone knows that King is interested in the show because he's written a couple commentaries on it, and allowed them to reference his work. Not to mention the little rumor that's floating around that he was the real author of Bad Twin, the book that the franchise released last summer... It's an interesting thought, at least, though I don't like the implications of a Lost/Dark Tower parallel. (cough)
Oh, and of the three of us, I was the one to guess correctly on the new station's name--"The Hydra." Go me. The whole Juliet/Sarah/Penny thing is irritating because the actresses haven't been around long enough, screen-time wise, for us to differentiate, and they've all become significant in the last two episodes--the last of Season 2 and the first of Season 3. Also, Ben. If that's his real name--given that I wouldn't be entirely surprised if it's another alias. And dude, is Mr. Friendly gay? "You're not my type, Kate." Eheheheh.
I know the six-week miniseries (first section of the season, then they break for a couple months and come back until the real end of the season) is supposed to focus on the Others, but I'm just dying to know what's going to happen with Michael and Walt, and what's going to happen on the other side of the island. Next week's promo looked promising, at least, for a look at them. Here's hoping.
So. This is the new, noodly thing to do. I'd actually been considering starting up blogging again, but I didn't want to resume it on LiveJournal. Mostly, I think, because I've already had experiences there that kind of tie me to a Mira of the past, as it were. Before-Mira, even. B.M. Hah. (*cough*)
Anyway. This seemed like as good a time as any to start up again; new site, new toys, and hey, maybe there'll be some perks for early members, too.
I think today I'm going to write about the book I've added to my list: The Dark Tower, by the ubiquitous Stephen King himself. I've never been inclined to read his work before, mostly because I don't do horror well. Or, as some might say, I do it too well. But since I've been in the vein of multi-volume fantasy epics, a chance reference to the title on Wikipedia made me think it might be worth picking up. And today I finished the final, seventh, book in the series.
I'm sort of hoping I don't feel as lost after the last Harry Potter comes out as I am with this series--I suspect if nothing else, I'll have had more time to absorb each book individually (since I've read each of those at least three times), and that should help make the ending a little more tolerable.
With Dark Tower, I think I might have been in enough of a rush to simply get to the ending--only to find myself admonished by the author for just that near the end of the story, uncannily enough--(cue ten-minute pause while Mira goes to play with the Cat of the House, who demands attention)
So! As I was saying. I think I may have rushed it a bit, as my first instinct upon finishing the book was to go back to the first one and start over. I felt unsatisfied. At the same time, and you know this if you've read the series, it's quite dense. It took me the better part of two weeks in my lunch breaks, and the time I spent after work. Oddly, some books (Wolves of the Calla, notably) took forever, while others (Song of Susannah) read quite quickly. Nonetheless, my point is that to go through the series once more seems like a task that's a bit heavy at the moment.
Not to mention I'd like to stop having the freaky dreams for a while, thank you Mr. King. Honestly! I've had more strange dreams in the past week and a half than I can remember having in quite some time. Of course, some of this may be attributed to the three or four feverish nights I've had with this recent bout of flu-ish sort of thing, but nonetheless. Disturbing dreams. Even when King's work isn't horror--and some of this gets fairly horrific, mind you--it's still fairly haunting.
And now to move onto more mundane matters--though I'm hoping that the book commentary will be a continued feature here. In my line of work, it's something I do fairly often, and it would be nice, I think, to someday have a record of what I've seen and read and what I thought--which is, after all, the point of the thing to begin with. And a fair better record of life than emotional teenage rantings...which brings me back to the first part of this post, and thus seems a good stopping point. Before-Mira time isn't something I care to have examined by all of my newer acquaintances. I'd like to make this something that, at least for the time being, I'd be happy to share.
Happy reading, all.
