Thursday Reviews: Gerald’s Game by Stephen King

Gerald’s Game

Stephen King

I read this one once about twenty years ago, before King wrote his On Writing. Jessie Burlingame is dreading a weekend getaway where husband Gerald (he of the titular game) wants to indulge in some good ol’ fashioned bondage. He cuffs Jessie to the bed only to have her change her mind. When Gerald doesn’t quite get that no means no, she kicks him in the balls. Which triggers a heart attack.

The keys are on a table that Jessie can’t reach, and so she spends a miserable twenty-four hours trying to figure out how to escape now that her husband is dead. During that time, a starving stray dog wanders in and decides that hunks of Gerald will do nicely as a substitute for whatever he’s been getting in local trashcans. During the night, a freakish looking man with a bag of bones (not really a reference to the later King novel of the same name) comes in and basically scares the bejesus out of Jessie by simply staring at her and showing her the bones. In the meantime, the voices in Jessie’s head, really all aspects of her personality, start arguing with her over what to do about her predicament. To kill time, they also force her to relive a childhood trauma she tried to pretend never happened. All this serves to make Jessie reach a radical solution to her problem.

This book has a vaguely supernatural tie to Delores Claiborne, the follow-up to this novel, but it comes off as a fragment of a dream. The book has more in common with Misery, though this is not a rehash. This book has a rather cathartic feel to it, as though Jessie’s ordeal is a long-overdue intervention of sorts. It’s a suspense novel, not really a horror novel, in spite of the freakish nature of Jessie’s late night visitor.

Get The F*** Out

A few years ago, Marcus Sakey passed through town signing for one of his books. We hung out later at The Rusty Bucket, which seems to have become the default destination for crime fic authors after signing at Joseph Beth Booksellers. We were talking about writing when the subject of profanity came up. Marcus said he always did a search for F bombs and took out or replaced half of them.

I had not thought of that before. I had two Keplers in the can and finished. Bad Religion was also done at that point, and Holland Bay was in progress. But was the F bomb really an issue?

When Northcoast Shakedown was first published, I ran into a problem. I did a radio interview in which I had to read a passage. I also had to read passages at Toastmasters meetings. I had to edit the passages on the fly as I read them.

I’m not squeamish about using profanity in my work. What I did not realize previously was that you still have to be conscious of how it’s done. So when I dug Bad Religion out for revisions this weekend, I found myself yanking out every two or three F bombs. Am I being squeamish?

I don’t think so. It’s one thing to write it in the heat of the moment. It’s another to be gratuitous about it. We limit how we depict violence and sex because those things should serve the story. In some stories, the author just won’t have any credibility if there isn’t swearing in every other word. But not every story. You need to be conscious of the readers.

It takes time to figure it out. And a good editor sometimes. Since I don’t have one at the moment, I’m trying to think like an editor.

Remission: Back On The Horse

I did pretty good losing weight. I went from 274 pounds down to 252. I was proud of myself, especially when I leveled off at 255 pounds. But then it happened, as it inevitably does. I slacked off on running. Then my birthday hit. Ten of those pounds came back. Sometimes, I get up to 267.

That’s a holiday thing. Always happens around Christmas. Part of it is I quit watching calories and slacked off on running. That’s gotta change. Yes, weight loss is the goal. I need to be under 240 pounds after Christmas, which means I need to stave off that holiday bloat as much as I can.

Which means I need to get back on a program. Right now, I’m not as worried as I might have been in the past. I’m still on only two medications. My sugar is fairly low, and my blood pressure is somewhat normal. But increased weight and lack of exercise can reverse the progress I’ve made so far. I don’t want that. I like being able to eat a candy bar without worrying about a diabetic coma. (I am not exaggerating.)

So this week, I need to restart running. It’s warm out now, and daylight goes past nine o’clock. So there are no excuses. I need to finish up my weekly trail ride this year. And I need to jump start the weight loss again.

I’ve decided, once I finish the bike trail this year, to do Insanity, one of the Beach Body workouts. I got the 30-day version. I’ve decided to spend June being insane, do some running in July, and, when classes end at the end of July, do Insanity one more time. So what’s that do for fall?

Well, with all that running, biking, and Insanity (which includes a diet plan), by fall, I should be ready to start training for a couple of 5K races. That will involve returning to my beloved Little Miami Trail for some distance running on weekends, visiting a park near Medishack for its par course, and possibly joining a running club. We’re also going to need a treadmill. There are three of us in this house, and we all have reasons to keep exercising. Nita and I wish they were AJ’s reasons, but AJ won’t even see 20 until next year. (I miss 20.)

The trick is not to have a program and stick with it. The trick is to always plan ahead.

That’s why I’m not swallowing half a dozen pills every morning and a few more every night. I want to keep it that way.

Star Trek Into Darkness

So JJ Abrams returns with a second installment of his vision of Star Trek. Last time, we were treated to faithful reboots of the original cast with the exception of James T. Kirk. No, Kirk sat at the epicenter of the changes from the original timeline, so instead of disciplined risk-taker William Shatner played, we got…

Well, Chris Pine’s Kirk was kind of an asshole who had to figure what he wanted to be when he grew up. He wants to be captain of the Enterprise, but is he ready?

We are treated for the first nine minutes to what could be the tail-end of a rebooted series on television. The Enterprise is surveying a distant planet inhabited by a species that is still trying to figure those new-fangled wheel thingies someone just invented. In order to preserve the budding civilization, which lives around a very active volcano, Kirk and Spock hit upon the idea of a stopping a cork in said volcano, only Spock is trapped when Sulu and Uhura have to leave him behind. The only way to save Spock is to fly the Enterprise, which has been sitting under water for two days over Scotty’s protests, over the volcano and beam him out. It’s classic Star Trek, and you can see Shatner and Nimoy pulling this kind of stunt if Gene Roddenberry had the technology and the budget to do it. But it also has two very bad consequences. First, the natives think the Enterprise is their god now. Second, Jim Kirk gets demoted to Christopher Pike’s first officer for falsifying reports and violating the prime directive.

That sets up the spoilery goodness after the jump.

Adulthood Sucks

You know what? It’s the weekend. I’m gonna spend the next coupla weeks being a kid. You folks try it.

Thursday Reviews: A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

A Farewell to Arms

Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway is often criticized for romanticizing war and glamorizing it as a test of manhood. There is nothing romantic about Hemingway’s tale of an American serving in the Italian army during World War I. Except maybe said American’s relationship with a Scottish nurse.

Lt. Frederic Henry is an ambulance driver for the Italian army in the north of Italy, where fighting, as it is on the better known Western Front in France, is a brutal stalemate. Henry is popular with his native cohorts, and it is Rinaldi, an Italian driver, who introduces him to Catherine Barkley. It’s not bad. He’s liked by his fellow soldiers. He has some authority, being a lieutenant, and Catherine promises to be a nice fling to break up the monotony of an endless war.

When Henry is wounded by shell fire, however, Catherine follows him to Milan while he spends the summer recovering. There, she becomes pregnant, and the two decide that they are already married. They just need a priest to make it official. They also decide to wait until after the war. Upon his return to the front, however, Henry is caught up in a retreat when the Austrians break through. During the retreat, he kills a sergeant for desertion, but then himself is rounded up by the “battle police,” little more than commissioned vigilantes, looking to kill any officer guilty of causing Italy’s defeat. He escapes in a river and flees to Milan where he and Catherine escape to Switzerland. They live an idyllic life in Montreux, long before some stupid with a flare gun burned the place to the ground, until Cat begins to give birth. How does it end? With Henry walking back to his hotel alone in the rain. You figure out the rest if you haven’t read it.

This is not The Sun Also Rises, a roman a clef of the Lost Generation’s trip to Spain. It does, like a lot of Hemingway’s best work, make copious use of autobiographical material. But Hemingway never saw the battles depicted, and his nurse lover, who never became pregnant by him, did not want to marry him. Hemingway is not telling his own life story. This is a man who, like so many in Europe in the 1910′s and 1920′s, was angry about World War I, seeing it as a pointless conflict designed to prop up a bunch of archaic regimes. He is particularly harsh towards Italy’s leadership and thinks little of America’s eventual entry into the war. All Frederic Henry gets out of the war is a ruined leg and a lost family.

Not very romantic at all, but then war is Zero Dark Thirty, not Hogan’s Heroes, isn’t it?

Holland Bay: The Final Report. For Now.

It is done. Finito. Finished.

Holland Bay Version 2.0 checked in on Mother’s Day at 90,613 words. To say that it looks nothing like the original I wrote a couple years ago is an understatement. In fact, it stopped paralleling the original about a third of the way through.

The ending is roughly the same, but without as many plot threads to wrap up. The original suffered from multiplying plotlines. A new character would appear, insist on having a backstory, and off we went.

Originally, I planned to plow through this from Thanksgiving through Valentine’s Day. Well, that worked out, didn’t it?

But for now, Holland Bay sits on my tower downstairs. I will not even look at it until I’ve finished revisions on Bad Religion.

I plan to do another one this summer, something original. The Richard Bachman to my Stephen King going to work. That’s right. I have a Dick Bachman to my Steve King. And my Dick is going to write a novel.