One of my favorite Stephen King novels, and movie adaptation, is Misery. It has been decades since reading the book or watching the movie, so I decided to watch it today as it was airing on one of our channels.
Misery is a story about a famous author, Paul Sheldon, whose car slides off the snow-covered road and he is later “rescued” by nurse Annie Wilkes (BTW played by Kathy Bates and that role earned her an Oscar). I had forgotten what it was that made Annie so angry at Paul, who she otherwised adored (adored almost to death). It was the fact that some of his characters in his book used profanities. Secondally, was that one of the main characters was killed off. I laughed out loud. This must be a common theme among authors and their readers and I thought I was alone.
In the midst of much positive feedback about the Stones of Yemen, the one criticism is that some of my characters use “profanities.” A couple of people have complained that the audio narrator doesn’t use enough emotion, for that I’m sorry. I’m not sorry for the characters who use profanities because that’s the real world. I like the real world, warts and all. I don’t talk like that. But I’ve also heard, not in a negative light per se, how some readers were distrubed by a main character “getting killed off” in the Stones of Yemen. But I couldn’t contain my laughter realizing how life immitates art. This is funny.
J. Michael Jones 