If there’s one central fact of Stephen King’s existence it’s this: he likes to write. The man has a genuine enthusiasm for putting words on the page that other bestselling novelists just don’t seem to share. J.K. Rowling appears to be almost exclusively focused on the world of Harry Potter and moving slower all the time, George R.R. Martin produces words the way most people pass kidney stones, and James Patterson farms out his writing to co-authors. But Stephen King genuinely enjoys sitting down every day and writing. He once gave an interview saying he writes every day except Christmas and his birthday. Later, he admitted that he actually works on those days, too.
This re-read covered 12 books King wrote in the first ten years of his career. Over that same period, he also wrote another novel, The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger; the short illustrated story, Cycle of the Werewolf; the long novella, The Mist; co-authored The Talisman with Peter Straub; wrote the screenplay for Creepshow; produced Danse Macabre, a book length non-fiction survey of horror; and turned out over a dozen short stories. He was writing so much that he even invented a second name, Richard Bachman, so that he could publish more books under another identity. Which didn’t necessarily turn out to be a good thing.
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