The King of Scary Stories, Stephen King, turns 58 today. I came into work this morning to an email from The Writer's Almanac, in which I learned some cool facts about the incredible author whom we will be featuring in the October issues of WRITING and READ magazines. (Check back with us in October for more about that!)
Did you know?
1) King's father was a merchant seaman who left home when his son was just 2 years old. One day, King found a box full of his father's sci-fi and fantasy books. It was this box that inspired him to start writing horror stories.
2) King wrote his earliest stories in the furnace room of his trailer home. (Maybe that's the inspiration behind the original opening lines he contributed to The Weekly Writer. You can help him finish the story!)
3) Bryon is going to see Stephen King speak at the New Yorker festival this weekend. Come back here on Saturday to hear all about it!"
4) In honor of King's birthday, about 75 books are going to be "released into the wild" by a member of Bookcrossing in Cologne, Germany today.
5) Last, but not least, King is one of more than a dozen authors currently participating in an e-bay auction to raise money for the First Amendment Project. Last week 76 people bid to have one of the characters in King's upcoming novel CELL named after them and the winning bid was $25,100. Wow!
Not that I can afford it anyway, but I'm not sure how I would feel about having my name in his book. Apparently if a female wins the auction, the main female character in the book will be named after her. That character is someone who will be killed off at the end of the novel which "comes complete with zombies set in motion by bad cell phone signals that destroy the human brain." Maybe I don't want to be famous after all!
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