Making our Stand

Like a lot of kids, I had a big problem with plagiarism, and was constantly ripping off the short stories I read and passing events from bigger novels off as my own. I wrote things with large chunks of Jaws and baldly copied one-page comics from Scream as my own before I was 10. 

I purged that out of my system pretty damn quickly, in favour of wider dreams and some deeply specific fan fictions, but there was one last time, when I was 12 and read the Stand, and all I wanted to do in the world was write an epic about post apocalyptic clashes with grand themes of good and evil. Obviously I only got three pages into it, even if the climactic bloodbath was all mapped out in my head. I was 12 and had lots of things to do.

But hell, if I was going to rip off anything, it would be the Stand. For several years, before I got my brain turned by beat poets and British comic writers, The Stand was jut the best book ever. I got my copy for $2 at a second hand store in 1987, and started reading it on the bus home, and I never stopped reading it for the next decade.

The intense detail, the epic scope, the characters that were fill of the same doubts and fears as real people, (although in this world, those fears could come at you in the form of an evil crow and peck your fucking eyes out). All that death, and the sparks of life that cling on. Randall Flag and the trashcan man. The sheer goddamn decency of Fran and Stu and Nick and Glen.

I've had a long belief that King's novels will one day be read as historical documents, because nobody captured the lives and fears of Americans in that age like King did .And even though he wrote of a world that dropped dead at the start of the eighties, that original book stands tall. 

I hated it when they revised it and took out the Howard The Duck references., and I hated the recent TV version, which had all the pieces to make something great and got it all wrong, worse even than the dusted pastels of the 90s version. But that kind of hate only comes with something you love, and sometimes try to copy.

I still want to write that book, maybe I can get more than three pages if I try.