King on Writing
Stephen King has submitted an interesting article to Entertainment Weekly (he is a monthly contributor) on unpublished books and writers. It champions the cause of one writer and book, Ron McLarty's "The Memory of Running", which has been released only in audio format. The crux behind the article is King's appraisal of the current state of the publishing industry. E.g., "Publishing houses, once proudly independent, are today little more than corporate wampum beads, their cultural clout all but gone." I suppose I've seen that come to pass in recent years myself; slowly but surely the 'bestsellers' have shown very little appeal for me.

I postulate that this is part of the global trend of the media catering to the common masses (don't get me started on reality tv). I talked at length about a related subject a while back, and now it seems that lowbrow, baser subjects are coming to dominate the written word, too. Complex movies, scripts, and books may be one day a thing of the past; at present they are started to be plainly ridiculed (most recently: The Matrix Reloaded") for being too tough for the public to digest (e.g., when a reviewer or moviegoer remarks, "It doesn't make any sense", or, my favorite, "It was dumb".). Boo hoo.

In any event, this doesn't present much hope for us unpublished writers. Of course, now I can say that only the BEST writers don't get published. SCORE!

PS. He also takes time to scathe one of my nemeses, James Patterson (one of my favorite anecdotes is how I threw his book, "Along Came a Spider", across the room after about 30 pages), for which I am endebted.