Writer's Report 2.0

In an interview article in USA WEEKEND to be released March 6th, Stephen King was asked if his mainstream success over the past 35 years paved the way for the successful careers of Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling and Breaking Dawn (The Twilight Saga)author Stephenie Meyer. He dishes out some hefty criticism about the most bankable author since J.K. Rowling, and offers his opinions on a couple of other well known writer’s.

USA WEEKEND
By Brian Truitt

(King) said he doesn’t know how much of an influence he had on Meyer, but he does know that Rowling read his stuff when she was younger. “I think that has some kind of formative influence the same way reading Richard Matheson had an influence on me,” King explains.

“People always say to me, ‘Well, what about H.P. Lovecraft?’ And the thing was, you read Lovecraft when you were a kid but I never felt that he was speaking my language. It was chillier than my heart was, and when Matheson started to write about ordinary people and stuff, that was something that I wanted to do. I said, ‘This is the way to do it. He’s showing the way.’ I think that I serve that purpose for some writers, and that’s a good thing. Both Rowling and Meyer, they’re speaking directly to young people. … The real difference is that Jo Rowling is a terrific writer and Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good.”

But then King recalls that when his mom was alive, she read all the Erle Stanley Gardner books, the Perry Mason mysteries, obsessively when he was growing up. “He was a terrible writer, too, but he was very successful,” King says. “Somebody who’s a terrific writer who’s been very, very successful is Jodi Picoult. You’ve got Dean Koontz, who can write like hell. And then sometimes he’s just awful. It varies. James Patterson is a terrible writer but he’s very very successful. People are attracted by the stories, by the pace and in the case of Stephenie Meyer, it’s very clear that she’s writing to a whole generation of girls and opening up kind of a safe joining of love and sex in those books. It’s exciting and it’s thrilling and it’s not particularly threatening because they’re not overtly sexual. A lot of the physical side of it is conveyed in things like the vampire will touch her forearm or run a hand over skin, and she just flushes all hot and cold. And for girls, that’s shorthand for all the feelings that they’re not ready to deal with yet.”

Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling has strongly hinted for the first time that she could write an eighth book in the series.

Rowling, 42, admits she has ‘weak moments’ when she feels she will pen another novel about the boy wizard.

One of her biggest fans – her 14-year-old daughter Jessica – has already put pressure on her to revisit the character.

And her younger children – David, four, and Mackenzie, two – are likely to join the clamor for another novel as they discover the Potter books.

However, if an eighth novel were to be written, Rowling concedes it is unlikely that Harry would be the central character.

She finished the seventh book in the series – Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows – last January.

At the time she thought she was ending a 17-year association with the boy wizard.
But in an interview with Time magazine, which put Rowling at No 3 in its Person Of The Year list, she said: “There have been times since finishing, weak moments, when I’ve said ‘Yeah, all right’ to the eighth novel.

“If – and it’s a big if – I ever write an eighth book, I doubt that Harry would be the central character. I feel I’ve already told his story.

“But these are big ifs. Let’s give it ten years.”

In the meantime, Rowling is working on two writing projects – an adult novel and a “political fairy tale” – and is involved in charity work.

It’s inevitable. When you get this big, this popular and this wealthy everyone wants to ride the coattails to success.

By DAVID B. CARUSO, Associated Press Writer

NEW YORK – J.K. Rowling and the maker of the “Harry Potter” films are suing a small publisher in Michigan over its plans to release a book version of a popular Web site dedicated to the boy wizard.

The suit, filed Wednesday by the author and Warner Bros. in federal court in Manhattan, claims that RDR Books will infringe on Rowling’s intellectual property rights if it goes ahead with its plan to publish the 400-page “Harry Potter Lexicon” on Nov. 28. (more…)

From the Associated Press:

By Hillel Italie, AP National Writer

NEW YORK – With author J.K. Rowling’s revelation that master wizard Albus Dumbledore is gay, some passages about the Hogwarts headmaster and rival wizard Gellert Grindelwald have taken on a new and clearer meaning.

The British author stunned her fans at Carnegie Hall on Friday night when she answered one young reader’s question about Dumbledore by saying that he was gay and had been in love with Grindelwald, whom he had defeated years ago in a bitter fight.

‘”You cannot imagine how his ideas caught me, Harry, inflamed me,’” Dumbledore says in “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” the seventh and final book in Rowling’s record-breaking fantasy series. (more…)

Publisher Weekly reports the creator of the phenomenally successful Harry Potter series will begin her limited engagement U.S. tour starting October 15th, in Los Angeles.