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Meet the Guy Who Fact-Checks Stephen King On Stephen King
cartechboy writes "Stephen King has sold more than 300 million books of horror, suspense, science fiction and fantasy. The guy has written so many works, and words, that he actually needs a "continuity adviser" to fact check him when he picks old stories up as a new book. Enter Rocky Wood — who is the world-wide leading expert on Stephen King's work. So much so, that King hired Wood (who has authored a 6000+ page encyclopedia on CD-ROM on every single aspect of King's work — including 26,000 different King characters) to fact check himself when he writes."
"Best sellers" are like collectible cards. People collect them because they want to have the complete set, not because the content is any good. The last time King wrote a book worth reading was a decade ago.
dude's life is horror, all around
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I need to become the world-wide leading expert on Rocky Wood's body of work...
...but this is the first time I've read or heard the term "CD-ROM" this decade. Really? If it was published on CD-ROM, wouldn't it be horribly out of date by now?
You should read his next book, it's about how Israeli plants high-up in the American government exercise the Sampson option by sending the United States into war with Syria in the Middle-East, only to be stopped by the leader of Russia. It's called Checkmate, available on newsstands today!
And here was I thinking that this is what Wikis are for
You have 5 Moderator Points!
Which Helpless Linux zealot/MS basher do you want to mod down today?
I'm not sure you understand what continuity means.
Every single new Stephen King book for the past 10 years has been worse than the previous ones.
That's because his more recent work is largely intertextual. You have to read like 10 of his other books (and various literature and poetry by other authors) to understand The Dark Tower.
Coming soon to a USA near YOU!
High-functioning autism as a career path? Heh.
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
See, this is exactly what celebrities need to do. Don't antagonize and arrest your stalkers, employ them!
And they said being an obsessive stalker would never pay off!
who prays for Satan? Who in 18 centuries has had the humanity to pray for the 1 sinner that needed it most? ~Mark Twain
I'm still pissed about that ending. So many years I spent following the series, wasted. Fuck Stephen King.
George Costanza. His webs of lies were so twisted that even he must have had a hard time keeping track of them all.
On a totally unrelated note, I don't envy Larry David.
Continuity checking "Fact checking"
How are there 26 thousand characters in King's work? He's written 56 novels, which is a lot, and a bunch of short work, but still, if half those characters are from his novels, that's 232 characters per novel. He'd need to introduce a new one every few pages, constantly, throughout the novel. Unless this counts people who are just mentioned once in passing, crowds, and whatnot, I have a hard time believing that.
--Joakim Ziegler
It's not like he didn't warn you, but you didn't care for the dire warning at the end did you.
I don't mind the ending so much as I hate the new books in general. Wolves of the Callah was downright awful (I really hated all the Harry Potter and other stuff), the one after that was not much better, and the dark tower finally was actually ok again.
I don't know why, but the first four books are exciting and amazing with a lot of suspense and mystery, and the last three just plain suck compared to that. It's like he figured that he really needed to finish the series and just rushed it. Or after the long break and the car accident he forgot what it was all about - I think he even alluded to this in some interview, I'm very fuzzy on the details though.
No, the end really was ok. It was the only logical ending I guess. But I wish anything between book four and that ending was left unwritten instead.
And in addition to all of this, he decided to mangle the original books with all the jesus crap. Fuck that shit!
George Costanza. His webs of lies were so twisted that even he must have had a hard time keeping track of them all.
And Walter White for sure!
I'm not sure you understand what a joke is.
https://kmccready.wordpress.com/2013/03/02/review-chinese-translation-of-stephen-king-%E6%96%AF%E8%92%82%E8%8A%AC%C2%B7%E9%87%91%EF%BC%89bag-of-bones-%E5%B0%B8%E9%AA%A8%E8%A2%8B/
work in progress
Wow. Rocky Wood must be a veritable encyclopedia of disappointing book endings.
I didn't mind Wolves. In fact, I more or less like The Dark Tower series as a whole. Yes, I've got some reservations (as I have about other long fantasy series - Lord of the Rings, Wheel of Time, Song of Ice and Fire), but as a whole, I'd say that I found more to enjoy than to dislike.
If I had a complaint, it'd be around the way the last two books are cut up. Song of Susannah is a very, very short book (not much more than a pamphlet really) in which not much happens. Then the final books is a vast tome (not much shorter than all three books of LOTR combined) with god knows how many plot threads within it. Even the meta-narrative crap (my least favorite aspect of the series) from book 6 has all of its conclusions pushed into book 7.
It doesn't much matter, now that the whole series is available and if you want to read through it you can do so with no delays. But at the time SoS was released... my word, I was not a happy bunny.
...a lamp monster! Ooo-oooh!
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
not because he is awful or such but Stephen King is awful.
I'm not sure.
Why does this lead in with "Stephen King has sold more than 300 million books of horror, suspense, science fiction and fantasy" -- sure, he's been a popular author, but the relevant info would be how many books he has *written*, no? How many *words* would be interesting to learn.
But if he wrote one book and sold 300 million copies, I doubt he'd need a continuity adviser.
I'm not.
99% of the time if Stephen King asks his fact checker where part of a story takes place, where a character has come from, or what profession the main protagonist was the answer will be "In Maine" and "an author".
I am!
I always thought that guys like Stephen King or Tom Clancy have their books written by a couple of ghostwriters and in the end only make a few corrections and put their approval stamp on it. Not that I have anything against that, publishing is a business... but I wonder whether I'm right or wrong?
Any professional ghostwriters among the /. crowd?
Yes you are.
Presumably he was on holiday when King finished the Dark Tower and crapped on a lot of the stuff from Insomnia...
You should read his next book, it's about how Israeli plants high-up in the American government exercise the Sampson option by sending the United States into war with Syria in the Middle-East, only to be stopped by the leader of Russia. It's called Checkmate, available on newsstands today!
It's like the inverse of a Tom Clancy novel!
I remember one of his books where an author got some problems with his 'Number One Fan'.
What do you mean fact check? It's all fiction. None of it is fact.
Fail.
The Dark Tower made me weep for him. Really. It's supposed to be his magnum opus and yet it's so flawed.
King has never been that appealing to me because so much of what I have read of his work (which isn't as much as I should have) has been stuff like recycled Lovecraft, recycled Hitchcock, recycled someone else.
But the Dark Tower has some genuinely brilliant concepts in it. Sadly, they glitter like gems in the mud. Some of the most fascinating and fantastic aspects were never really taken to their conclusions, while a lot of the book read like a bunch of unrelated stories bound together with wattle and daub.
Jake's death in volume 1 made me itch. Then Roland just sits on the beach while crustaceans munch his fingers off. Neither he nor the crustaceans were believable at that point.
By the end of the series, it had degenerated into a mish-mash of throwing in chunks of stuff from his other works, then added insult to injury by writing himself into it. That's a trick that only the most capable of writers can pull off, and sadly, he wasn't one of them.
Then, when it all wrapped up, there were loose ends galore, and it turned out to be just a recycled version of The Never-ending Story.
This kind of thing is quite common. George R. R. Martin of "Game of Thrones" / A Game of Fire and Ice infamy, recently talked about the obsessed fan he calls and asks to fact-check what he is writing, specifically to verify details about characters, rather than continuing to get things like "eye color" wrong, and accidentally changing the gender of a horse between books... etc.
http://teamcoco.com/celebs/george-r-r-martin
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I got about a quarter of the way through the first book and then got bored, just couldn't pick it up again.
Are any of the other books better? Or are they just as slow, contrived, and unimaginative? Holy everyone else has done it better, batman.
This is pretty much the experience I have with every Stephen King book except the Stand, the only book he's ever written with any characters I cared about. So maybe he's just not for me.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
So when in fact did he die? I have seen it reported in this blog many times...
Truly an American Icon
The first book (The Gunslinger) is terrible. By King's own admission, it's essentially an oversized student essay. When it was around a decade ago reprinted, it had some fairly major changes to make it fit better with the rest of the series. But by and large, it's awful.
Things improve markedly with the second book, which has actual... you know... characters and plot. The third and fourth are excellent, the fifth divides opinion but I like it, the sixth a very short and doesn't do much and the seventh is an epic in its own right.
The ending is infamous and many people hate it. Or rather, the second ending is infamous. There is a break point at which he cuts into the narrative and says "you can stop here". If you stop there, you get a perfectly fine open-ish ending. But nobody ever stops there.
I honestly thought wizards and glass , something like that, the 3rd book... was the best one. This one really set the tone for the gunslinger, and took place when he was younger and you basically had knights with guns mixed in with a western, I liked it a lot. The others were kinda sorta ok, page turners and some few good select scenes but felt a bit on the wondering side. Book 3 was the one that really stood out to me.
Perhaps.
It's so annoying to always have the protagonist be a writer. It's self-aggrandizing that an author always puts himself as one of the main characters.
Hey all. I just heard some sad news on NPR talk radio. Bestselling horror/sci-fi author Stephen King was found dead in his Maine home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure many of us will miss him. Even if you don't enjoy his work, there's no denying his impact on popular culture. Truly an American icon.
I write solely in ASCII, so I'll never have more than 127 characters. :-(
Koans and fables for the software engineer
I haven't read very many of his books, but I thought The Green Mile was excellent.
Free Martian Whores!
I would argue quite the reverse. The first, second and third books where the best, then it went downhill from there. The last three books aren't even worth reading. Read the first three, maybe the fourth, and stop there.
That particular job sounds especially hellish.
Levon Ycnalc Mot a fo esrevni eht ekil s'ti?
Then you should read the new 4.5 The Wind Through the Keyhole which takes place in the same old time western age as Wizards and Glass.
...to notice the lack of an ending to The Colorado Kid before they sent it off to the printers.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.