by Jay Wilburn
The plan is to reread all of Stephen King’s works in the order that they were published. Richard Chizmar of Cemetery Dance had the vision. I’m doing it because I am a writer and I want to improve my fiction. And I love Stephen King’s stories. I think there is something to be learned through this process.
You can also go back to the beginning and read Before Carrie or any of my other posts up through this one and beyond by checking out this link to the Master List of all my #StephenKingRevisited posts.
I quit teaching on a Thursday in February of 2013 and have been a full-time writer ever since. At the time I’m writing this, I have about 30 novel and short story collection releases on my own or with collaborators. At the time I quit my day job, I had one novel out and a lot of short stories in anthologies. What I didn’t have was any excuse to believe I could make it as a full-time author.
The younger of my two sons was having seizures. He had them every time he got a fever and putting him in daycare so that both my wife and I could work was keeping him sick a lot. We had a choice of putting him on seizure medication which potentially could stunt his development or staying home with him to keep him well until he was old enough to outgrow them.
I was disenchanted with teaching, so I volunteered to quit and pull out my retirement early to keep us going. The idea was that I would make a go at full-time writing for a year and then could go back to teaching. Deep down, I had no intention of ever going back to teaching. I wrote an article on it for PMMPublishing’s blog about it very shortly after quitting my job. It may have been the very next morning, I believe, based on how I ended the article. I barely remember that guy who existed the first days and weeks after quitting my day job. You can read that article and get an idea of where I was mentally at that time. Some of what I wrote then still holds true. Other things I have achieved, am pursuing now, or have exceeded and outgrown.
It might have been for my birthday that year following quitting my day job or may have just been a gift for a gift’s sake, but my wife bought me a couple books including On Writing by Stephen King. It’s the copy I’m about to revisit now.
I read this book in the heady days of first quitting my job and writing full-time. Also, in the whirlwind of trying to take care of my son and get him well.
There is a certain desperate and magical place this book holds in my heart and personal history. It is sort of a benchmark in my journey through being a full-time author.
Revisiting this book now at this point in my career feels like an interesting moment. In some ways, it is a confirmation of my choices and struggles. In other ways, it is a reminder that I still have a lot to learn and relearn.
My next post in this series will be After On Writing which will be linked on the Master List of all my Stephen King Revisited posts.
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