Stephen King心聲

（之前因為一粒粗口而出唔到呢篇blog, 天啊！）

Quote from the introduction of Stephen King's Everything's Eventual:

Writing them (stories) is not so pleasurable. I can only think of two in the current collection - the title story and "L.T.'s Theory of Pets"--which were written without an amount of effort far greater than the relatively slight result. And yet I think I have succeeded in keeping my craft new, at least to myself, mostly because I refuse to let a year go by without writing at least one or two of them. Not for money, not even precisely for love, but as a kind of dues-paying. Because if you want to write short stories, you have to do more than THINK about writing short stories. It is NOT like riding a bicycle but more like working out in the gym: your choice is use it or lose it.

Stephen King在書中的每一個故事的前或後分享了故事緣起、靈感來源和他對故事的感想等，感覺和讀者很親近。你可以想像得到他揮筆疾書時的樣子。

他在前言中也講及一件事。原來Bullet這個故事是他在那次嚴重交通意外後寫的。寫作有助他減輕痛楚。而這亦是他第一次出版電子書的故事。電子書推出後大受歡迎，比他的紙本書反應還要好，他賺了很多錢(...... and I ended up making an embarrassing amount of money. (Except that's a fxxking lie, I wasn't embarrassed a bit.))，到哪裡都被人包圍，甚至登上了《Times》的封面。

但這些反應反而令他很苦惱，因為大家關心的只是他出電子書的經驗，沒有人與他討論他的故事：

-And what was driving me crazy? What made it all seem so pointless? Why, that nobody cared about the story. Hell, nobody even ASKED about the story, and do you know what? It's a pretty GOOD story, if I do say so myself. Simple but fun. Gets the job done. If it got you to turn off the TV, as far as I'm concerned, it (or any of the stories in the collection which follows) is a total success.

-But in the wake of 'Bullet,' all the guys in ties wanted to know was, 'How's it doing? How's itselling?' How to tell them I didn't give a flying fxxk how it was doing in the marketplace, that what I cared about was how it was doing in the reader's heart? Was it succeeding there? Failing? Getting through to the nerve-endings? Causing that little frisson which is the spooky story'sraison d'être? I gradually realized that I was seeing another example of creative ebb, another step by another art on the road that may indeed end in extinction. There is something weirdly decadent about appearing on the cover of a major magazine simply because you used an alternate route into the marketplace.There is something weirder about realizing that all those readers might have been a lot mor einterested in the novelty of the electronic package than they were in what was inside the package. Do I want to know how many of the readers who downloaded 'Riding the Bullet' actually read 'Riding the Bullet'? I do not. I think I might be extremely disappointed.

E-publishing may or may not be the wave of the future; about that I care not a fiddler's fart,believe me. For me, going that route was simply another way of trying to keep myself fully involvedin the process of writing stories. And then getting them to as many people as possible.

This book will probably end up on the best-seller lists for awhile; I've been very lucky that way.But if you see it there, you might ask yourself how many other books of short stories end up on the bestseller lists in the course of any given year, and how long publishers can be expected to publish books of a type that doesn't interest readers very much. Yet for me, there are few pleasures so excellent as sitting in my favorite chair on a cold night with a hot cup of tea, listening to the windoutside and reading a good story which I can complete in a single sitting.

他最關心的，是讀者有沒有讀他的作品，以及短篇小說集在市場上的命運。