Trashed my post, and hangin’ out on the web…

Posted on by


Sheesh.

I was planning to comment today on the SinC/PW top ten book list brouhaha, but I think we raked those leaves pretty thoroughly with Clare’s post yesterday and John’s post on Saturday.

So this afternoon I abandoned my half-finished post and spent the rest of my free time trolling the ‘Net for any other controversial literary topics that could get folks hot and bothered. A bit of juicy publishing gossip. Something.

I came up blank. I got nothin‘.

About the only thing my web surfing did for me today is leave me stunned and slightly disoriented by the sheer abundance of information that’s out there. Twitter, Blogpulse, Google Trends, Wonder Wheel, Wikio…yikes!! Our global attention span is being chopped to 140-character bits.

Eventually I lost the energy even for reading on the web, and wound up…where else? YouTube.

I was going to entertain you with some videos of funny cats (some of them really are gosh-darned cute), but then I started gravitating to book videos and author interviews. And I remembered that Stephen King has a big release this week, UNDER THE DOME. It clocks in at 1088 pages. That’s got to be 1.5 pages for every character in your average small town in Maine. The story has an interesting premise: A small town gets cut off from the rest of the world and finds itself, literally, under a dome. It reminds me a bit of a short story I read recently by King called THE MIST. I liked that story (even though I wasn’t sold on the monster in it), so I’ll probably give UNDER THE DOME a try.

Here’s Stephen King talking about story, followed by a reading:

What do you think? Will you run out and buy the book? If you’re a writer, have you ever gone back an resurrected a story you abandoned in previous years, as Stephen did?

6 thoughts on “Trashed my post, and hangin’ out on the web…”

  1. I think I remember Homer Simpson causing the same fate for Springfield by dumping pig manure in the Town’s lake.

    I’ll eventually get it, but right now my to be read pile is about to topple over.

  2. Mine too, Wilfred. I inherited boxes of Stephen King’s previous works, and I’m looking forward to reading all of them. What a prolific career he’s had!

  3. The new King opus was my contribution to the Amazon/WalMart/Target price war and should be arriving momentarily.

    I sold my soul to the dark master some time ago. It didn’t hurt at all . . . well maybe when I was trying to read “Lisey’s Story” and “Duma Key,” but every obsession has to have moments of torture.

    Ms. Gagnon are you out there? My copy of “Gatekeeper” arrived, but I can’t read it until I get “Boneyard.” It has been missing from my library for over two weeks! Is this a conspiracy to send me back to Amazon?

    For another amusing timesink, Janet Reid posted this link:

    http://tinyurl.com/6e2xus

    Y’all being in the biz, I thought it might amuse you.

    Terri

  4. I like King as a writer more than I like his subject matter, so I doubt I’ll read this one. (I also need a compelling argument to hang with anyone for almost 1100 pages.)

    I have gone back to resurrect stories, and gotten a couple of those moldy oldies published. Sometimes our idea machine runs ahead of the development of our craft, and we’re just not ready to write a particular story for a while.

  5. Terri, love that list, especially the one about the author bios.
    Dana, that is really true about the ideas running ahead of the craft. I have ideas queued up like planes waiting to land at LAX, and wonder if I’ll ever be able to execute all of them the way I want to.

Comments are closed.