May Sweeps - Day 460

You know, if I had just fallen asleep last night without having written, this would all be over and I'd be free.

I act as though, if I miss even a single day, that I will never write again.  And maybe that's as it should be.  I feel I'm just going through the motions now, no longer inspired, no longer driven, just 

Sit-ups Today: 100
Sit-ups In May: 561

In just three days of extra work (and five minutes of waiting for a vaccination), I read all of Stephen King's new book, "Later."  I really ought to do a whole podcast about it, because it was kind of a bizarre read.  First of all, it was published by the Hard Case Crime imprint (of Titan Books), which specializes in putting out pulp detective novels and hardboiled mysteries, both vintage ones (by writers like Erle Stanley Gardner and Donald Westlake) and new ones (by Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins).  King put out a book years ago (2005) called "The Colorado Kid," which was his attempt at emulating the mystery novels of old, then he put out another one (in 2013) called "Joyland," which was quite good (and was more of a Coming of Age-type story--with supernatural elements--than a mystery or crime novel).

This one, though, had no business being put out by Hard Case Crime, and it has this pulpy, sexy cover that deliberately misrepresents what the book is about.  In short, it's about a boy who sees ghosts, whose stressed and overworked single mother parent, discovers that her son has this haunting ability, and comes to believe it.  In other words, it's about 98.4% the plot of THE SIXTH SENSE.*

And it's pretty solid, and fairly underwritten (something you can't say about Stephen King works in decades).  It all ties up in the end, but leaves room for a sequel (although I found the ending to be the weakest part--something King critics bring up over and over again).  And it reminded me, in a fairly obvious way (if you've read the book), of my recent story "My Friend of Misery."  

I can't complain enough about the cover to the book, by the way.  I absolutely hate it, the way I hate things like "Look What You Made Me Do" by Taylor Swift or WAR OF THE WORLDS by Steven Spielberg (pieces that I loathe by artists that I love).  There is an international version of "Later," and its cover is, oh, I'd say about two hundred and thirty-five times better than the domestic one.

The book in no way makes me want to hurry up and write a sequel to "My Friend of Misery," but it did remind me that Brielle Montrose is still out there, and her brother's friend is now her friend.  And I like the possibilities of that, and the idea that I can catch up with her some day, if I decide to.

Push-ups Today: 167
Push-ups In May: 667 (shoot, one too many)

The spatula is my favorite utensil.  What's yours?

Words Today: 1010
Words In May: 3724

*And right off the bat--and a couple of times afterward--the story comes right out and says, "Yeah, yeah, this is like that Bruce Willis movie.  Except this is real."  And that didn't bother me in the slightest.  Yet when Ernest Cline did it in his book "Armada," which is a variation on THE LAST STARFIGHTER, but mentioned in the book that "Hey, this is like what happened in that old movie, THE LAST STARFIGHTER," I wanted to kick him in the chicken giblets.  I guess that makes me a hypocrite.  Or just a human being.