I hear he’s doing all right in the New World. Well, here’s to him. And as an occasional toiler in the fields of literature myself, I often have cause to remember, with pleasure, all the things I learned back then from Harlan Ellison.

I’m still using them now.

Anyway, sir. Three cards. Round and round and round they go, and where they stop, nobody knows. Are you feeling lucky today? D’you think you can find the lady?

I wrote this for the ReaderCon 11 program book, 1999. It is not to be factually relied on.

On Stephen King, for the Sunday Times

I began life as a journalist, interviewing authors. I don’t do it any longer. But I’d never interviewed Stephen King. Cathy Galvin, then at the Sunday Times, called and asked if I would interview King for them. By perfect coincidence, I was in Florida writing a book, not far from where King was staying. I took a day off from my own book, and I drove west.

Preamble

THE SUNDAY TIMES asked me to write something small and personal about King and me for the contributors’ notes, and I wrote this:

I think the most important thing I learned from Stephen King I learned as a teenager, reading King’s book of essays on horror and on writing, Danse Macabre. In there he points out that if you just write a page a day, just 300 words, at the end of a year you’d have a novel. It was immensely reassuring—suddenly something huge and impossible became strangely easy. As an adult, it’s how I’ve written books I haven’t had the time to write, like my children’s novel Coraline.

Meeting Stephen King this time, the thing that struck me is how very comfortable he is with what he does. All the talk of retiring from writing, of quitting, the suggestions that maybe it’s time to stop before he starts repeating himself, seems to be done. He likes writing, likes it more than anything else that he could be doing, and does not seem at all inclined to stop. Except perhaps at gunpoint.

THE FIRST TIME I met Stephen King was in Boston, in 1992. I sat in his hotel suite, met his wife, Tabitha, who is Tabby in conversation, and his then-teenage sons Joe and Owen, and we talked about writing and about authors, about fans and about fame.

“If I had my life over again,” said King, “I’d’ve done everything the same. Even the bad bits. But I wouldn’t have done the American Express ‘Do You Know Me?’ TV ad. After that, everyone in America knew what I looked like.”

He was tall and dark haired, and Joe and Owen looked like much younger clones of their father, fresh out of the cloning vat.

The next time I met Stephen King, in 2002, he pulled me up onstage to play kazoo with the Rock Bottom Remainders, a ramshackle assemblage of authors who can play instruments and sing and, in the case of author Amy Tan, impersonate a dominatrix while singing Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’.”