Pardon me for being so plain, but plainly speaking, said plainness, painfully, is such by virtue of being default. So you see it isn't my fault for appreciating the essence of this symbolic set's aesthetic aura. Orally I prefer circles and squiggles and curves and spirals but textually, I prefer squares and arrows and lines and more lines. I prefer a good suit and tie to sweatpants and a t-shirt even though I'm hypocritically wearing the latter now.

Happy Birthday, Steve-O. You were very kind to me back in 1978, when you were Guest of Honour at a Science Fiction convention here in Nashville. That was Kubla Khan Ate, which you later mentioned in a biographical work. I was then writing for a local alternative paper "Take One"; they asked me to try for an interview with you. With much trepidation, I hesitantly inquired: "Uh...excuse me, Mr. King, but are you giving any press opportunities this weekend?" You replied: "Well, a bunch of guys are coming up to my room to hang out and drink beer later," and gave me your room number.

This was *before* "Different Seasons" came out and helped you transcend the genre, when you could still AFFORD to hold court at SF conventions. It might have been one of the very last times you just gave out your room number and said "Come on up, kid." A small group of local journalists gathered in a circle as you sat drinking beer on the bed, coming across like the cool English teacher you used to be. Those were still your drinking days, Steve; you were putting down 3 to my one, and I drank 5 beers. Yet you were crisp, direct, and without any detectable phoniness. Most of all, you had a great sense of humour, and as I've said, you were very kind to us, giving your personal time, for which you were not paid extra. "Wouldn't it be a bitch if God turned out to be, I don't know, Mickey Mouse?" you said, and "Take One" used that as an outtake for my article. To illustrate how different your station in the literary world was at that time, my exclusive beer-soaked interview with Stephen fuckin' KING was NOT the cover story; it was page 5 or so. The dumbasses were way behind the curve.

Anyway, after my 4th beer, I got brave and said, "Y'know, Steve, that scene in 'The Stand' where the conditions are all absolutely perfect for that atom bomb to be set off in Vegas, entirely due to the karma of the characters, not NEEDING any deus ex machina to cause it, why exactly did you feel the need to actually have the *literal* hand of God appear and make it happen? I mean, God hadn't done SHIT for any of the protagonists up to that point; it felt sort of gratuitous; why did you do that?" Like I said, I was 21, a kid.

Steve, who was then a bit chubby, a big man with wide shoulders, smiled through his Winter beard, drained his 9th beer, and chuckled: "'Cuz God can do whatever He wants!"

I said: "I can't argue with THAT."

God CAN indeed do whatever He wants, ESPECIALLY if He is being written by Stephen King. Many years later, I loaned the issue of "Take One" with my King interview to one of my many psychotic girlfriends; naturally, it was lost, and thus I have no proof that this story is true. You could ask my first wife, I guess; she would back me up, wherever she is. But hang with me a moment and trust this wonderful memory: before Steve became ***STEPHEN KING***, before the public had even read the novellas in "Different Seasons", much less seen the films "Stand By Me" or "Shawshank Redemption"; before his kids started saying "Oh, Daddy's going off to be Stephen King" whenever he went on tour; long, long before Roland got anywhere near the Dark Tower, this man was very kind, and most of all, very human, with a punk kid from West Nashville.

I ALMOST met Charles Bukowski at the poet Miller Williams' house in Fayetteville, AR when I was 15; I missed him by a week, but when I later read of his stay with Miller in the book "Women", it was still a great kick to read his impressions of Miller and his wife, Becky, whom Buk described as "looking like a movie star, only with more class." He was right on the money about Becky.

But let's say that if God had offered me a choice between meeting Buk as a loud, opinionated 15-year-old acid head who believed he was already a poet, and meeting Stephen King as a very slightly more subdued 21-year-old trapped in a horrible marriage, a kid who had pretty much given up the idea of ever being able to write again; a kid who had no hope of ever getting one hour alone to himself, much less solitude for creating art, a kid whose world was one of bleak and continual loveless responsibility to his manipulative invalid wife...well, I would have to say:

"Well, *shit*, O Nuit, my Lady of the Stars...Buk was in full Chinaski Mode at the time...they told me he grabbed Becky's ass and puked on Miller's rug...dude would probably have been on the edge of blackout drunk, and might have called me as 'a sniveling little shit" or some equally dismaying snarl of dismissal, and it would have fucked up my enjoyment of his work...SO, if it be Thy Will, set me up with Steve King when I'm at my lowest and need it most, and if You can, make it happen BEFORE he gets too big to be able to afford just having some guys come up to his room for beer and talk. A couple of hours with Steve? Plus BEER? THANK YOU, O Goddess of Infinite Space and the Infinite Stars thereof!!!"

I really think I got a good deal from Her. Let me say in passing that I have zero respect for the opinions of 'serious' writers, whether of the Academy or the so-called "small press", who, not having read a single book by Stephen King, somehow "know" that his Work is "trash". These types seem to believe that it takes no craft, determination, discipline, or real imagination to do what Mr. King has done--that is, to have married real life and its continual petty problems, including scenes we rarely see in novels, such as the main character being interrupted while taking a shit, with the incursion of "unreal" and "irrational" forces such as vampires, dark Gods from the Lovecraft Cycle, sociopathic cops, rabid dogs, pyrokinetic children, and haunted hotels (I was lucky enough to have stayed at the Stanley Hotel in Colorado, the basis of King's 'Overlook Hotel' in "The Shining", with my wife Maxine, just before we became parents to our Wonder Twins, Logan & Morgan. The room in which Steve had begun "The Shining" was, as usual, occupied by some young writer who thought the "luck" might rub off, with a 3-year waiting list of future guests. As we all know, however, hard work, unlike "luck" doesn't rub off--as Buddha said about "salvation", we must do it ourselves.)

Steve King makes us CARE what happens to the realistic people he has created when the fangs and tentacles come out of the pregnant darkness. When relatively obscure South American writers run this sort of gig, the Academics coo over it and praise it as "Magical Realism". When Stephen King does it, and does it WELL, because he can WRITE...well, it's like this: if a long-dead Eastern European writer has someone wake up transformed into a cockroach, it's ART of the most rarified kind. But if Steve King turns someone into a bug, or a werewolf, or even his own shadow-self, WELL. That's not Art, that's *vile trash*, ESPECIALLY if *too many people read and enjoy it*, because, as we all know here in the hermetically sealed Ivory Tower, anything POPULAR--like rock music, science fiction, comic books, The Simpsons, Bukowski stories, or similar gutter leavings that will never, ever have a learned thesis written about them--ANYONE who is *accessible*, anyone who is POPULAR--you automatically KNOW not to consider it 'serious' writing.

YOU did it all 'correctly'. It should be YOU at the top of the bestseller list, with your novel about driving around Connecticut in your Volvo whilst suffering midlife angst, your plodding ode to the Winters in Jersey, or your book of heavily Buk-influenced poetry angrily denouncing Bukowski and all his Works. YOU are a 'serious' writer of 'literature', not a fat, drunk, drug-addicted hack churning out 'potboilers' up in Maine. Let's just forget that Steve wised up early on into the kind of fame that kills a lot of artists around the age of 27. He lost the weight, tossed the booze, passed through the fire of drug addiction and came out whole, only to be smashed nearly to bits by a moron in a van. Once again, he was on heavy opiate painkillers soon after escaping them. And once again, Steve King showed his steel and kicked the Oxycontin, rehabilitated his body, got back up and got DOWN to writing his fucking ass off.

He even included the accident that smashed him in the final volume of his 7-book, 30-year epic, "The Dark Tower", and got revenge on the idiot who ran into him by portraying him as what he WAS--a drunken imbecile who couldn't watch the road because he had to stop his dog from eating the hamburger out of the cooler in the back seat of his van. And in doing so, in telling this very personal story of how it feels to be knocked out of your boots by a ton of hurtling steel, he maintained such a high pitch of dark, brilliant humour that I couldn't help laughing my ass off as fictional Steve went flying into a tree. I knew that Mr. King would gladly forgive me. He was probably laughing himself as he wrote the sequence.

There are a lot of precious little writers simpering around who can't write if they have a mild headache or just feel, you know, sort of *depressed*. Fucking Steve was back at the keyboard before the final casts came off. So, though I may love you personally (or not, as the case may be), I do not love your UNINFORMED OPINIONS about Stephen King, and you can shove those up your ass sideways. As the great Harlan Ellison has noted, people are always quick to claim "I'm entitled to my own opinion!" Harlan's riposte for such folks is this: you are entitled to your INFORMED opinion.

If you haven't watched one episode of the Simpsons, but "know" (as did the grim bitch I lived with in Philly for 4 grueling years) that it's "trash"; if you've never perused a graphic novel by Neil Gaiman, but "know" that all "funny books" are puerile, childish nonsense bereft of Art; if you absolutely KNOW FOR SURE that Stephen King is a terrible hack writer, and your opinion is based on (as one anti-King writer on Pressure Press admits) having seen one really rotten film based on a single King short story (that would be "Maximum Overdrive", based on "Trucks", a solid little short story, but a whole film based on a very short story--oy! not much depth to work with), plus ONE book, "Gerald's Game" (which is psychosexual existential 'real life' horror, and not for the squeamish, definitely), and you have IGNORED King's other FIFTY or so books because you "know" they are "trash" (unlike your brilliant work about how cold it is in Jersey during the Winter), well. You don't have an INFORMED OPINION, motherfucker.

So you go right on believing that you could write rings around King, and that your position (much like my own) as a writer who is known (just barely) only to the small press, is a gross miscarriage of divine justice because YOU are a 'serious writer', and that somehow, King has usurped your rightful place in the Sun. Let's forget he WORKED his way out of a trailer that nearly blew over in a high wind, that he wrote (as did I once) in a closet next to the water heater, balancing a child's desk on his knees, that he and Tabitha raised 3 incredible children, one of whom, Joe Hill, is already a writer of astounding talent for ANY genre (read "Horns", please, and INFORM yourself).

I know that Bukowski was an asshole, sure. And I know that Steve King, like all of us, surely has plenty of pettiness and bullshit in him; he's a human, right? But he was kind to me with nothing really in it for himself; I wasn't there representing the New York Times, after all, just a throw-away local rag. So I do grow tired of the jealousy-based, UNINFORMED shit-sniping at Bukowski and King which seems so ubiquitous wherever writers, that lousy crew of which I'm part, gather online or in person. Yes, King has written some clinkers--if you write a LOT, you will, by simple mathematics, write SOME shitty stuff. But what were *you* doing when Steve-O was WORKING? Admiring your first edition of G.K. Chesterson? Online, whining about how dreadful things are now that Joseph McCarthy (like Joe DiMaggio in the Simon & Garfunkel song) has gone away, leaving a secret Muslim in charge? If you aren't Working, don't badmouth the writers who ARE.

Stephen King Works every day but Christmas and his birthday, and his wife says he's lying about not writing on his birthday. Which is TODAY; the dirty liar is probably working on a short story or revising a novella about now. Well, get your Work out of the way, Steve-O, than relax and enjoy your family. You've earned it. You ARE the American Dickens; you have outsold the Bible; your work is appreciated and taught in the Universities of the world. Only the blind knee-jerk willfully ignorant reality-snobs oppose you, and they are feeble, man, like bugs that have crawled out of a bottle of ink...

The great Science Fiction writer and theologian Phillip K. Dick says that God is like an elusive animal, a Zebra, perhaps, who is always there, but often hidden in the form of "trash" like Science Fiction, comics, rock music, and "childish" cartoons. We find the Logos in the rubbish heap; He is indeed like the Biblical cornerstone which the builder rejected. The Work of Stephen King is one such cornerstone for an edifice that may not stand forever, but STAND it will, for hundreds of years...or longer. Even if we Apocalypse ourselves, the survivors will still remember fragments of the King they read, and put their heads together beside the fire to try and remember back the books that have been vaporized.

Happy Birthday, Stephen, and thanks again for tolerating me at Kubla Khan Ate.

Your pal,

Curt

PS: Oh yes, shit, I almost forgot; I'm being asked for my favourite King short story. That's a tough one, but I think I'll go with "Everything's Eventual".

EXCALIBUR,

your Constant Reader

C Ra

This pain cultivates within me. This seed of sorrow buried deep in my soul roots itself in the soil of my emotions and sprouts in my heart. I am dying from the inside out. I am aching in every bone and every muscle of my body, and there is nothing that can fix me. Nothing can restore me from my brokenness. Nothing can sew back together where the fabric of my heart is torn. I suffer in silence, not letting anyone know my pain. But between every breath I take I am screaming internally. I scream so that someone will come and save me, but no one ever does.

7-Eleven

just past dusk

I watched them from inside

standing there arguing

over cigarettes

he was a disgusting fuck of a human being

head shaved bald, shining with sweat

a black sleeveless shirt and

black tweeker jeans

and those weird tweeker fingerless black gloves

she was an old Native

skin scorched to leather

eating something sloppy

from inside

next to her drink on top

of the garbage can

I paid for my things and watched them while I waited for my change

he raised his arm up at her

weak fist

and she flinched

the counter girl gave me

an apologetic look

I walked out and unlocked my door

set the bag on the passenger seat

and he did it again

I closed my door and walked up

to the sidewalk

he looked at me and I shook my head

“What the fuck, man?”

he put his hands up

“Hey, it’s cool, brother. Hard ass day.”

she looked at me indifferently

and put another

bite into her mouth

I walked back to my car and heard him talking low

“You fuckin’ bitch. The fuckin’ cigarettes are OURS, you goddamn hear me?”

I started the engine, he raised the arm again

and I shut it off

the counter girl walked out and said something

to them and went back inside

he walked off in a huff

clutching his backpack in his slimy grip

she watched after him and yelled,

“YOU DON’T WANT ME HAVIN’ NOTHIN’!”

she swallowed another bite

bit the straw and drank

trashed the food

threw her bag over her shoulder

grabbed her drink

and walked after him

I restarted the engine and backed out, took a left onto Solano, drove up my street

and thought about living alone

the glory and restlessness of it

all the good and bad

but at my house

the dogs were there

the machine was there

the night was there

and there was something

young about it

I parked in my driveway and killed

the lights.

O spilt milk,poor forgotten cliche

spreading across the floor

all fuming

angry at your owner,

who shed no tears for you

why become foul and spoiled?

truly yours is

an understandable dilemma

from a cabinet of many shards

that was not the first glass to break

but I am spongy soaking

meet me and be relieved

I will suffer through disasters

you will not be left on linoleum

I am spongy soaking

yellow and green is here to stay.

She laid on the hard, cold concrete floor in pain. Her left eye was swollen shut, and her lips and nose were busted. A few of her ribs felt broken, almost as broken as her soul in that moment.

She was naked and shivering from the cold. Her hands and feet were bound by a thick rope, and every time she tried to move, the rope dug into her wrists and ankles.

She was so tired, not just physically but also mentally. She fought for so long to try break free, but the more she struggled, the worse the pain became.

Then, she heard the door open. Light flooded onto her bloody face, with the warmth from outside the room rushing onto her cold and bruised skin. He slowly approached her, as if examining her from a distance to see how much enjoyment he could squeeze out of her.

He grabbed a hold of her by the hips. She wanted so badly to move or scream, but she absolutely couldn't. She had no energy and, more importantly, will left to make her do something. She just looked out of the open door to what was beyond the room. She saw a moderate sized desk with papers and a lamp sitting on top of it. There was no chair beside the desk. Instead, a stool took its place.

Then, he picked her up to where she was on my hands and knees. He began to take off his belt. Then his pants. Then his underwear. She felt the pain and pressure of a penis up her anus. This was the third time today, and she had lost count of how many times this had happened in total. Yet, she still wasn't use to the penetration. She still felt violated each time. She still felt as if she didn't deserve this. As if this was the first time.

He rode back and forth for just a few minutes before being finished. But it felt like eternities were between each movement. Back and forth. Back and forth. Back and forth.

Then, as he was redressing his lower body, she managed to utter, "Why..?"

He paused for a moment. Then, as he continued putting his pants on, he said in the bitterest of tones to her, "Because I like it." He began to walk away. "And you do too, bitch."

Then he shut the door and walked away. And there she laid, vulnerable and hopeless. She knew that this was her life now and that she would always just be an instrument for men's sexual frustrations. She had accepted that.

But what she couldn't accept was why it had to be that way, why God had to play such a cruel joke on her, and she knew that that was going to haunt her for all of her life.

We’ve all had it, that moment when nothing comes to mind.

Our words stare back at us, asking to be fleshed out, continued, fulfilled, and we can do nothing to help them. Our protagonist has gotten herself stuck firmly this time, and is going nowhere fast.

The most important thing about keeping momentum in writing is staying flexible. Sometimes you have to change what happens and add something to the plot you hadn’t foreseen.

Let’s say you introduce a new, secondary character. Who is he, and how does he know your protagonist? Now, as the author, you’ve embarked on a whole new decision tree, if you will, exploring each branch to see which might bear fruit. How exciting!

Of course, a new character means the necessary work of fleshing him out, giving him a viable and plausible life and place in your story. The point is that his new character has opened a door and given you a way forward, if you choose to take it.

Maybe it’s not a new person that your story needs, but a new place. Your protagonist takes a trip. Is it for business, or pleasure? Has she been there before? What happens to her understanding of her situation while she’s away?

...

Tune in to The Official Prose. Blog for the full article by Seattle author Anne Leigh Parrish at: blog.theprose.com/blog.

struggling with my sieve like brain,

even when comprehending,

descriptive linguistics,

so much of it drains away,

leaving only hollow sympathies.

is there anything

to be said?

in fact it's true

what is there in the saying

without any action?

should anything

be said?

but actions can be extreme

disconcerting reactions

to a fate that may never come.

and while it's debatable,

if words will ever even fall,

on rougher ears,

with no thought,

with no touch for listening.

maybe there's a place for words,

and it would give you comfort,

if maybe there's a place for words,

for they share some small touch.

Her veins bled onto the page

Spilling secrets

Hidden under lock and key

A solemn song

Etched into these walls

Crumbling

Tumbling down

Falling rain

Slowly drips

From her face

Smearing ink

Staining skin

Hardened by time

Like her mind

That refuses to let them in

Though they are knocking

Kicking

Slamming

Trying to pry

But no matter how hard they try

She remains inside

A prisoner

Inside herself

Can you feel my heart beating?

Can you see my wrists bleeding?

I'm asking for a person

To save me from myself.

Can you feel my hands shaking?

Can you see my heart breaking?

I'm asking for a person

To save me from this hell.

Can you feel my life falling?

Can you hear my soul calling?

I'm asking for a person

To make me feel all right.

Can you feel my hope fading?

Can you hear my life changing?

I'm asking for a person

To stay with me all night.