When I got home from work yesterday, I found two huge boxes awaiting me from Cemetery Dance. Within were my author copies of The Illustrated Stephen King Trivia Book, both the trade paperback (lovely) and the hardcover (gorgeous). Just when I thought the hardcover was great, I took off the dust jacket and saw the design on the book itself, which is also terrific.
This is my first book as editor, though my work on it is a little more extensive than that. It wasn’t just a matter of gathering up all the contributions, correcting them for grammar and style, and collating them into logical order. I also wrote a fair number of the questions, especially those dealing with the later Dark Tower books, but also in a bunch of other places to beef up some sections that were under-represented. I’m very proud of our achievement with this volume and I got that feeling again, the one I get when I see my name on the cover of something or in the pages of something. I’ll never deny that I have an ego or some measure of vanity so long as that feeling is with me.
Watched Lost last night, and continue to wonder where the series is taking us, but liking the direction it’s going and perfectly willing to be swept along by it without over-analyzing it. I do see a lot of Stephen King in it. Last night’s episode had a very Eddie Dean-like Charlie, who had this overbearing compulsion to look after someone, exactly like Eddie did with Odetta/Detta. Roland comments on this in Drawing of the Three. Eddie used to have his brother to look after and was lost for a while until he had someone else to care for. Charlie, the junkie, the prisoner, goes through the same process.
After the show, I turned off the TV and went to my word processor to tackle a story that has been percolating in my head since November. My view of the tale has changed only slightly since then. Up to now, all I had written was the opening page and a bunch of story/plot notes. I noted with some consternation on here a while ago that a secondary character had wrestled the point of view away from the character I expected to narrate. I fixed that last night. The story really wasn’t going to work that way, especially since I know the main character so well and the secondary character, his girlfriend, not so well. Then I took off and wrote 1700 words last night and another 1300 this morning. Well into the story, but I’m not sure exactly how far. 1/3 of the way at least, but I’m hoping to be closer to half. Originally I was shooting for 5000 words, but now if I can keep it under 10,000 I’ll be happy. The story is currently called Orion’s Belt. The story is going very well so far–I just hope I can keep it going at this pace and get it to where it needs to go!
