beginning On Writing by stephen king
ok, i have to share. this book had me giggling to no end the other night. i must have been in a strange mood, but here is the passage that got me going:
…I was enchanted by the idea of shitting like a cowboy. I pretended I was Hopalong Cassidy, squatting in the underbrush with my gun drawn, not to be caught unawares even at such a personal moment. I did my business, and I took care of the cleanup as my older brother had suggested, carefully wiping my ass with big handfuls of shiny green leaves. These turned out to be poison ivy.
Two days later I was bright red from the backs of my knees to my shoulderblades. My penis was spared, but my testicles turned into stoplights. My ass itched all the way up to my ribcage, it seemed. Yet worst of all was the hand I had wiped with; it swelled to the size of Mickey Mouse’s after Donald Duck has bopped it with a hammer, and gigantic blisters formed at the placed where the fingers rubbed together. When they burst they left deep divots of raw pink flesh. For six weeks I sat in lukewarm starch baths, feeling miserable and humiliated and stupid, listening through the open door as my mother and brother laughed and listened to Peter Tripp’s countdown on the radio and played Crazy Eights.
yeah, i know. i’m picking up tidbits of writing advice but i’m mostly just entertained. on a sweet note, i did find an inscription from my dad:
on writing
so, the other day my dad gave me “on writing: a memoir of the craft” by stephen king. he actually bought it on amazon after thinking that it would be something i liked. how sweet was that? not to mention how i completely adore uncle stevie’s column in entertainment weekly. so if there was any book on how to write that i could read, it would definitely be stevie’s account of how it all went down in his life. from the second foreword:
this is a short book because most books about writing are filled with bullshit.
looks like we’re off to a good start.
the bookend. 