I bought “On Writing” by Stephen King for a quarter last sunday and it was a good read. It only took two evenings of bad TV to read it.

Mr. King and I have entirely too much in common. I will never be a best selling writer, but I kept on finding strange overlaps in experiences and influences. We have much not in common, as well, such as smoking, alcoholism and drug addiction (I am too cheap to spend my cash an any of these things). We both were affected early by Forest J Ackerman’s monster magazines. I was crazy about them – so was King. We both tried to write like Ray Bradbury for a while. I never got over it, although King moved on. Lots of little things like that.

I am not sure that we would get along, but I feel that I understand him much better after reading the book.

I want to write like Ray Bradbury, but with characters like Fritz Leiber’s, but I want themes like Murray Leinster, but with a voice like Robert Heinlein.

I don’t want to write like King. His prose flows extremely well and you can zip though one of his books in a day or so, but I don’t like what he does to his characters. He seems to manipulate them from a distance and the characters act like his personal puppets. You never get the idea that they have free will or think outside their little boxes. I have only read a couple of King books, so maybe I am wrong here.