Richard Bachman - Blaze

I believe I am the only writer in the history of English story-telling whose career was based on sanitary napkins; that part of my literary legacy seems secure.

I have had the same reaction to Everyman, by Philip Roth, Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, and The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, by Kim Edwards — at some point while reading these books, I just start to laugh, wave my hands, and shout: “Bring on the cancer! Bring on the blindness! We haven’t had those yet!”

Not in an actual trunk, though; in a cardboard carton.

A dame with trouble in her eyes. And ecstasy, presumably, in her pants.

Also a throwback to the bad old paperback days, now that I think of it.

In my career I have managed to lose not one but two pretty good novels-in-progress. Under the Dome was only 50 pages long at the time it disappeared, but The Cannibals was over 200 pages at the time it went MIA. No copies of either. That was before computers, and I never used carbons for first drafts — it felt haughty, somehow.

And, of course, it’s an homage to Of Mice and Men — kinda hard to miss that.

Purple, pulsing, and panting.

To learn more about The Haven Foundation, you can go to my website. That be www.stephenking.com.

I didn’t like the idea of Clay Blaisdell growing up in post-World War II America; all that has come to seem impossibly antique, although it seemed (and probably was) okay in 1973, when I was pecking it out in the trailer where my wife and I lived with our two children.

If I had written it today, certainly cell phones and Caller ID would have needed to be taken into consideration.