I watched 55 movies, including documentaries, this year (full list here), and will probably rack up a few more in the coming week. Most of these were watched with my wife, although I watched some alone because they weren’t something that interested her. I only saw three of them in the theater; the rest were on streaming. Most were films I watched ( Read more... )

Season’s greetings and happy holidays and all that! This is part one of my annual year-end review. As the title above suggests, this one is about writing/publishing and things I’ve read, which seem to go hand in hand.

This year has been a pretty good one for writing projects. My latest book Stephen King: His Life, Work, and Influences (Young ( Read more... )

I joined Twitter 15 years ago, about three years after the “microblogging” platform came into existence. In that time, I have tweeted (or retweeted) 326,000 times, liked nearly 300,000 posts, blocked 6700 accounts and muted 600 other. I acquired over 10,000 followers, making it my most successful social media platform by far. Yesterday, I ( Read more... )

Thanks to a referral from an online acquaintance, I was asked to moderate a dialog with bestselling author Daniel Kraus at the newly re-opened River Oaks Theater in Houston. His recent novel, Pay the Piper, is a collaboration with the late horror director George A. Romero. Kraus found the half-finished manuscript among the papers in Romero’s ( Read more... )

Last Sunday, I was hosted by Village Books in The Woodlands to celebrate the release of Stephen King: His Life, Work, and Influences (Young Readers’ Edition). It was a beautiful day after a run of really unpleasant weather, so there was a good chance no one would show up because people wanted to take advantage of the nice day. I joked to my wife on ( Read more... )

Today is the day that Stephen King: His Life, Work, and Influences (Young Readers’ Edition) is unleashed upon the world. It’s available in paperback wherever books are sold and there’s also a Kindle edition.

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A lot of people in our region didn’t take Hurricane Beryl seriously when it entered the Gulf of Mexico. Early indications were that it would go to Mexico (which it did) and keep going that way (which it did not). Then it looked like it would make landfall in Corpus Christi, 250 miles southwest of us. But it kept inching further east and it ( Read more... )

Several weeks ago, I was contacted by Michael Small of the I Couldn’t Throw It Away podcast. Their series is a discussion about things he and his cohost, Sally Libby, rediscover. They then debate whether it’s junk to be Marie Kondo-ed or a valuable item to be kept. Michael, who was a reporter for People magazine, interviewed Peter Straub and ( Read more... )

I’ve been using (and re-using) a joke that goes like this: The last time I saw a movie in a theater was 1917. It only makes sense if you remember the great Sam Mendes war movie of that name, filmed to look like it was done in a single shot. My wife and I saw it in the cinema in January 2020 and, until yesterday, I haven’t been in a theater since.
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Where the hell did February go? We even got an extra day this year and still…gone. Finto.

So, what’s new? Well, on September, 2024 I’ll have a new book on shelves…bookstore shelves and library shelves, if all goes according to plan. We have produced a new edition of my latest book that is aimed at young adult readers. So many teens begin their ( Read more... )