Barry wrote: (snip) > This said, I disagree with whoever suggested that Stephen King "needs > editing."
As if Barry didn't know who that person was. What a coward. > I find reading his latest work a refreshing throwback to the days in which > writers didn't pander to attention > spans shortened by a lifetime's exposure to "sound bites" and artificially > shortened exposition. Bullshit. That isn't what editing is, and it isn't what King needed. As he so often does, Barry simply made a stooooopid assumption that would give him a reason to take a shot at me for making a point he didn't understand in the first place. Such a phony. I dare him to read "Duma Key" and tell us he thought its second half didn't need to be heavily pruned and shaped. (Remember, I said the first half--where the exposition takes place--was brilliant.) I don't, frankly, know (and neither does Barry) whether in his heyday King himself had an infallible sense of how much was enough, or whether it was a savvy editor. But if it was his own sense, for sure he had lost it in some of his recent books and lacked an editor with the guts to keep him on track. If he has regained it (or has realized he needed an editor), good for him.
