We never send out spam or unsolicited commercial email.
If you have received a newsletter and no longer wish to recieve it, please use the link at the bottom of the email to unsubscribe.
If you have received anything beyond a newsletter or a response from the message board, the most likely cause is that people are "spoofing" our information for their spam.
Basically, they're sending email from their own servers, but making it look like it comes from here.
If you are experiencing this problem, get the header information from the message (e.g. in Outlook, with the message open, go to View -> Options - the information is listed in a pane at the bottom of the window) - copy and paste the information into a forward of the email and send it to both spam@uce.gov (US government watchdog) and to abuse@<the actual originating host>
--------------------------------
Here is a sample spam header:
-------------------------------- Return-Path: <cchdebbxkc@yahoo.com>
Received: from 70.Red-80-34-123.pooles.rima-tde.net (70.Red-80-34-123.pooles.rima-tde.net [80.34.123.70])
by host1.stephenking.com (8.11.6/8.11.6) with SMTP id j07HppB20784
for <webmaster@stephenking.com>; Fri, 7 Jan 2005 12:51:54 -0500
Received: from 107.32.92.12 by 80.34.123.70; Fri, 07 Jan 2005 16:44:55 -0100
Message-ID: <AMPIYBASMFSSIGZZWDQEWOJS@
yahoo.com>
From: "Some Made-Up Name" <cchdebbxkc@yahoo.com>
Reply-To: "Some Made-Up Name" <cchdebbxkc@yahoo.com>
Subject: the american 2005 doctors & medical directory, anesthesiology.
Date: Fri, 07 Jan 2005 11:51:55 -0600
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
boundary="--8700024879819880212"
X-IP: 18.127.136.146
Status: ---------------------------------
As you can see, although the message says that it is from cchdebbxkc@yahoo.com, it actually originated from the IP address 80.34.123.70.
Because people can both "spoof" the email address and the name of the originating server, the best resource to use to determine the ACTUAL source is available for free at http://www.arin.net - just do a whois lookup (put the IP address in the text field at the top right of the site and click "Search Whois"), you'll have all of the information and you can send the email to the proper regulators.
The internet is (at best) a shady place. The FTC is working to remove spammers violating the new laws, such as spoofing addresses, but the only way they can do their job is if we all do a bit to catch these devious individuals.
I (the webmaster) personally receive several hundred pieces of spam a day on the StephenKing.com server alone - many spoofing addresses at Stephenking.com!
How can I find out if you're going to be doing any book signings or appearances?
ANSWER
We do not, as a rule, post book signings or appearances on Stephen's web site. In the past when we have done that, it has caused enormous problems for the staff of the book store where the signing was to be held because they were inundated with phone calls asking for information. We give the local venue the option of listing the signing on the web site but they usually ask that it not be announced and prefer to do their own local advertising. We have not yet found a way to let fans know about book signings in another way. We are considering revising our mailing list to include a category for notification of book signings. Stephen does not have any book signings or appearances scheduled at this time.
Bev Vincent, (with the assistance of materials made available by Rich DeMars, John Mastrocco, Steve Oelrich and Shaun Nauman) has compiled a table of criteria you can use to determine if you have a first edition of one of Stephen's books.
There is no official Stephen King fan club--he is very uncomfortable with that kind of attention. If you would like to keep abreast of official Stephen King news, we recommend you sign up for the newsletter.
Stephen was raised as a Methodist and attended church regularly in his youth. He no longer attends church, but he does believe in God and reads the Bible. Tabitha, his wife, was raised as a Catholic.
The answer to that is fairly simple-there was nothing else I was made to do. I was made to write stories and I love to write stories. That's why I do it. I really can't imagine doing anything else and I can't imagine not doing what I do.
I get my ideas from everywhere. But what all of my ideas boil down to is seeing maybe one thing, but in a lot of cases it's seeing two things and having them come together in some new and interesting way, and then adding the question 'What if?' 'What if' is always the key question.
No, I don't. I really have enough story ideas of my own. Every now and then somebody will advance a concept the way that my foreign rights agent, Ralph Vicinanza suggested wouldn't it be fun to do a modern-day serial story. The result of that was The Green Mile which was published in installments-these little paperback books--but he never suggested what sort of story I might have written in installments and I wouldn't have accepted it if he had done that. I believe in thinking up my own ideas. I really have enough. I really think if I have two or three ideas ahead I'm in totally great shape.
Will you read my manuscript and tell me what you think?
ANSWER
No. If I did that for one person, I would feel like I'd have to do it for a great many people and in a lot of cases you can read a page or two or three and just say to yourself, 'This is terrible.' But nobody wants to write that kind of letter, 'Dear so-and-so, I started to read your manuscript but it was just awful so I tossed it aside.' That makes everybody feel bad, including me, so I don't do it. There's another reason, and that's a legal one. I've been sued for plagiarism 8 or 9 times. Any writer who has deep pockets has been sued for plagiarism from time-to-time-that goes for J.K. Rowling, John Grisham, really everyone. For everyone who publishes best-selling fiction, somebody wants to think, 'Oh, he got that idea from me' and so it's just much easier and much safer to say I never read that book at all.
I need an agent/publisher, can you tell me the name of a good one?
ANSWER
As well as there being some legal problems with this, the choice of an agent or publisher depends upon your style of writing. There are some good reference books--Literary Market Place and Writer's Market - and check to see if your state has a writer's association.
Sorry, but we are no longer accepting submissions for the writing exercise given in On Writing. We have asked that the offer to make submissions through the web site be deleted from future printings. When he came up with that idea, Stephen wasn't thinking about the fact that someone would months or years later read his offer and want to participate.
I did that because back in the early days of my career there was a feeling in the publishing business that one book a year was all the public would accept but I think that a number of writers have disproved that by now. I'm one of them and the guy who writes the Along Came the Spider books is another one who's written two or three books a year. Danielle Steel usually publishes two books a year. So the public will accept more than one book from a writer in the course of a year. The thing is, one book is all most writers want to produce or can produce in the course of a year and some of them only publish a book every two years. Ed McBain is another novelist who publishes multiple books in some years and his original name was Evan Hunter. That's the name he's always published under and he adopted the pen name of Ed McBain for the same reason I adopted Richard Bachman and that was that it made it possible for me to do two books in one year. I just did them under different names and eventually the public got wise to this because you can change your name but you can't really disguise your style. The name Richard Bachman actually came from when they called me and said we're ready to go to press with this novel, what name shall we put on it? And I hadn't really thought about that. Well, I had, but the original name - Gus Pillsbury - had gotten out on the grapevine and I really didn't like it that much anyway, so they said they needed it right away and there was a novel by Richard Stark on my desk so I used the name Richard and that's kind of funny because Richard Stark is in itself a pen name for Donald Westlake and what was playing on the record player was "You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet" by Bachman Turner Overdrive, so I put the two of them together and came up with Richard Bachman.
Sorry, but Stephen doesn't provide individualized writing tips. He has published On Writing A Memoir of the Craft which is a non-fiction book on the craft of writing. Although more difficult to find, Book-of-the-Month Club also published a non-fiction companion book titled Secret Windows.
Stephen does not teach any writing classes and doesn't have any immediate plans to do so. If you haven't already read it, though, he has written a book with writing tips called On Writing A Memoir of the Craft.
I've always resisted that idea because movies have a way of freezing characters and places in the audience's mind whereas in books everybody has their own different idea of, for instance, how Roland or Susannah looks but if you do it as a movie, immediately that kind of gets frozen in place and you say 'Oh, Billy Bob Thornton is what Roland Deschain looks like.' Or you say 'Brad Pitt, that's what Eddie Dean looks like.' You know what I'm saying, or you can say 'Calla Bryn Sturgis from Wolves of the Calla looks like maybe the Universal back lot', and I've always resisted that. The issue with The Dark Tower books is there's so much story, so many incidents, that it couldn't be done in one movie alone. It would have to be done at least as a trilogy the way The Lord of the Rings movies were done or it would have to be done as a TV series, probably on HBO because of the violence, the way The Sopranos was done. I haven't entirely ruled that idea out but for the next two or three years while the books have their initial run, I think that if you want the story of Roland, you'll have to get it at your bookstore rather than the local movie theater.
2007 UPDATE:
Stephen has sold J.J. Abrams (LOST) the option to develop a proposal for a Dark Tower adaptation. If that proposal is accepted, a film adaptation will go forward.
Why did my copy of Wolves of the Calla turn my hands black?
ANSWER
It was the first time the publisher had used a cloth cover saturated with dye. They won't be repeating this process for other books or reprintings of Wolves of the Calla.
No, I'm not. I have a predisposition--and it's a genetic thing--to macular degeneration and that's a disease you can read about on the internet. It eventually results in blind spots and a loss of vision but I don't have any of the symptoms yet-just that predisposition and I think it's something that I may have to face in the future, but, no, I'm not going blind.
Not yet. I'm writing but I'm writing at a much slower pace than previously and I think that if I come up with something really, really good, I would be perfectly willing to publish it because that still feels like the final act of the creative process, publishing it so people can read it and you can get feedback and people can talk about it with each other and with you, the writer, but the force of my invention has slowed down a lot over the years and that's as it should be. I'm not a kid of 25 anymore and I'm not a young middle-aged man of 35 anymore-I have grandchildren and I have a lot of things to do besides writing and that in and of itself is a wonderful thing but writing is still a big, important part of my life and of everyday.
Is it true that you have an annual campfire ghost story event?
ANSWER
No, I really don't. I did a campfire ghost story once as a favor to the local PBS station in central Maine. They were raising money and one of the things they did was for people who pledged a certain amount, they got to come to this campfire event and that was kind of fun, but it was a once-only event.
Do you really have a haunted house at your home on Halloween?
ANSWER
Absolutely not - don't come to my house on Halloween. We've done trick-or-treat a few times and we had 600 or 800 - one time we had 1,400 people show up for candy and treats and it's fun, it's great to see everyone, but it wears everybody out and it plays hell with the law so we're not doing that anymore.
Actually, I'm hoping to write a sequel to almost all of my novels and you will find those in Wolves of the Calla, Song of Susannah, and The Dark Tower--really in the whole Dark Tower sequence. You'll find out a lot of what happened in 'Salem's Lot for one thing and one character in particular - I'm not going to tell you which one. This is in no way an advertisement for The Dark Tower books, but it is my way of saying that The Dark Tower books finishes up a lot of business from the other books.
Now it can be told--the actual author of The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer is suspense novelist (and Rock Bottom Remainder bass guitarist) Ridley Pearson. Ridley did a great job--I couldn't have done better myself. Here's hoping you will continue to support Ridley's work by buying a copy of "The Art of Deception." - Stephen King
In the Princess Bride it says you're going to write the abridgement for Buttercup's Baby. Is that true?
ANSWER
No, it's not true. That's a little joke from Bill Goldman who's an old friend. He's done the screen adaptations for a number of my novels. He did Misery, Dreamcatcher, and he also did Hearts in Atlantis, and although he's not credited, he worked on Dolores Claiborne as well, so Bill and I go back a long way. I admired his books before I ever met him and as a kind of return tip of the cap, he put me in that book The Princess Bride. But actually I think that that particular baby, Buttercup's Baby, is Bill Goldman's and if there's ever going to be a story about Buttercup, Bill will have to write it.
There are no mass market audiobook editions available at this time. The suggestion has been made to the audiobook publisher that these titles are in high demand and it is now in their hands whether and/or when to produce them.
What is "The Kingdom" that is credited in the beginning of Kingdom Hospital?
ANSWER
"The Kingdom" was a Danish mini-series by Lars von Trier first aired in 1994. It was originally titled "Riget," and is the basis for Kingdom Hospital. Click here for the IMDB listing.
It was written by author, Rick Dooling, who also wrote episodes 6, 7, 8 and 11 as well as co-writing episode 5 of Kingdom Hospital. Rick also served as a technical advisor and producer for the series. He is the author of White Man's Grave and Brain Storm.
