Thursday Three #64

1. Unbelievably, it’s actually news that after having three kids, Marie Kondo, organizational and tidying guru, has admitted that tidying is no longer a priority. I get it. Having a neat and/or clean house while trying to wrangle little kids is a Sisyphean endeavor. It also brings to mind the popular meme that says that mothers can only pick two of these: clean house, happy kids, sanity.
2. Speaking of being a mother, while I was once again struggling to get my daughter to sleep in the wee hours of the morning, I foolishly read Stephen King’s Later. The book was very enjoyable, just not at 3 a.m. When I finally got back to sleep, I kept having nightmares. That said, I wish Stephen King would write shorter books like that more often. They’re much faster to get through.
3. These days, I have been asking myself if I would be brave enough to die for my faith if the opportunity arose. If someone held a gun to my head and said they’d kill me if I believed in God, would I affirm or deny Him? The Bible says that to lose one’s life for Jesus is to save it, and many chose Jesus over their existing lives (not necessarily dying, just radically changing their lives). Would I be able to change my life, even? Sometimes I’m not so sure.

Crazy Uncle Steve

Caution: This post may contain SPOILERS!

Ever since I had my son, reading books has not been quite the same experience as it was back when I was blissfully childless. I used to read all kinds of stuff where terrible things happened to children, and it didn’t really bother me much because, obviously, it’s just fiction. Now when I read about terrible things happening to children, my teeth are set on edge and my eyes fill with tears. Yes, it’s still just fiction, but after I had a child, something in me softened and it is very easily wounded. (Fellow parents, have you experienced the same thing?)

Anyway, so why did I want to read Stephen King’s The Institute when the plot involves children being brutally punished? Because I am a die-hard Stephen King fan. That is literally the only reason. That soft spot in my heart was repeatedly stabbed (or slapped or electrified by a zap-stick) by the horrors I read about in the book, and yet, I still kept reading because the plot was just that addictive.

I want to say I enjoyed the book, but I also didn’t enjoy it because of that. I also came to the uncomfortable conclusion that one of my favorite authors is getting a little crazy in his old age. He insulted President Trump not just once but four times, and a few of his other liberal viewpoints came out when politics didn’t have much to do with the book’s plot or the characters’ motivations. I just rolled my eyes, the way you would when one of your coworkers or family members makes a political statement you don’t quite agree with. OK, crazy Uncle Steve. I get it. You hate conservatives and wish Trump would jump out of a plane without wearing a parachute.

Also, I wondered what went through King’s head when he wrote some of the torture scenes. He’s written some gory, nauseating stuff before, but I don’t think he’s ever written about the misery of children at this level. I’m not sure the book would have been published if it had been written by someone else. (Similar to It. Had that sex scene in the sewer been written by anyone else, the book would never have seen the light of day.)

The Institute also contained a bit of hypocrisy. If King thinks guns are so terrible and bad, why did he have his protagonists use guns against the enemy? If King believes that torturing children is an awful, terrible thing (like any sane person would), then why does he also believe that abortion is OK? I don’t really want to know the answers to those questions, but it did make me worry about King’s mental health.

Will I read other books by crazy Uncle Steve? Of course. I’m a Constant Reader.

Retired from Writing

Someone at work must have been getting rid of their embarrassing romance novel collection, because there were a ton of free books sitting in the break room. I can’t resist books, and every now and again, I will read a romance, just to roll my eyes at how unrealistic and sappy it is, so I picked up a few of them.

One of them was written by LaVyrle (have no idea how to pronounce that) Spencer, an author I had never heard of. The book itself was pretty good, a contemporary (for the time it was published: 1995) romance, although I found the male love interest kind of boring. But this post isn’t a review of the book. To me, romances are pretty much all the same and that one followed the same pattern.

I read some more about the author online and found out that the book I read was her last book and that she would be retiring from writing. What a luxury! But who could ever retire from writing? I remember reading that Stephen King, after he had his accident in 1999, said he was going to retire from writing. But he never did. He’s written tons of books since then.

King sure as hell didn’t keep writing because he needed the money. He must have done it because he couldn’t not write. I wonder if the same was true of Ms. Spencer. Did she truly love writing? If so, how could she just stop? Perhaps she had some kind of physical injury that would prevent her from writing. Maybe writing became too mentally taxing or emotionally painful.

Or maybe she didn’t retire from writing but from publishing. That I can understand. It must be freeing to write whatever the heck you want on any schedule you want, without worrying about publishers and editors breathing down your neck.

I don’t know what I would do if I was a published author with several novels already under my belt. Would I retire from writing if it had become like any old day job? Perhaps. It is hard to say because I have never been in that position.