The 1989 Pet Sematary movie was possibly the scariest screen adaptation. The psycho toddler zombie with his maniacal laughter? Brrr...

I enjoyed the Dark Tower series; I didn't like the long wait between The Waste Lands (#3) and Wizard and Glass (#4). And when Wizard and Glass proved to be almost entirely a flashback, it made me very angry at first, but the flashback story ended up being so good that I came around to it.

A lot of readers didn't like the meta/fourth wall stuff in the later volumes, with their "Stephen King" character, but I ate that up.

And I liked the ending. There is some hope there, though we don't know if he'll retain enough of an idea of what happened to be able to get things right this time around.

I've thought about The Dead Zone a lot these past few years. We'll leave it at that.

For Misery, a friend and I used to throw around the term "Dirty Birdy" to the point where it became annoying. Also, there was "Dirty Pillows" from Carrie.

I liked It until the ending. The gangbang scene was the essence of the current phrase "don't make it weird." He did.

All four of the novellas in Different Seasons were very good. Also the novella size seems to be about the ideal size for a movie adaption.

One more thing about the Bachman Books. I mentioned that the ending to the Running Man was a bit shocking to our modern outlook, but there was also Rage, where the antihero protagonist shoots up a school, back before school shootings were a thing. There was some heavy stuff in that collection.

Me too. If you're into non-fiction, you might like John McPhee's Draft No. 4.

This reminds me of a convo I just watched in which George Saunders talks about his own writing process as a journey through uncertainty, and the importance of improvisation and revision


Thanks for the detailed list! I think Running Man sounds like a good place to start, for me. I'll probably get to The Stand, too, when I'm ready for a big one.

Looks good. I ordered a used hardcover on Amazon for $8 and free shipping. I'll have it after Thanksgiving.

Colbert seems to be the only reader left on the late night circuit. We used to have Tom Snyder and Dick Cavett interviewing Norman Mailer and Truman Capote and Vonnegut and the like.

Haha not the first time I’ve made this middle on Stand By Me instead of Lean On Me, not sure why I do this.

I might have to get the Bachman books.

I think Running Man is interesting and worth a read, but I am not sure it can stand next to King's earlier, edited stuff.

Yes, I should have written "The Dark Tower" instead of "The Gunslinger" which is the book #1 of the series.

To be fair, I only read the first 3 ones. I should probably re-read the whole series at some point.

What did you think of the Dark Tower movie?

I read somewhere that the standard for adapting a book into a movie is roughly one page per minute of movie, which may be why some of King's 90-150 page novellas have transferred so well to feature-length films.

Now, unless we're doing a rigorously faithful adaptation of the book--which is generally frowned-upon, given the obvious differences in how we process books vs film--the movie is going to skip or combine some events and characters, while adding others, and it's going to focus longer on different aspects of the story--usually the more cinematic ones--while giving shorter shrift to stuff like the character's interior moments: see, for example, Deckard's narrative internal monologues in Blade Runner, which were cut out in the Director's cut, to the benefit of the movie, according to a number of critics.

Still, in spite of all this, one minute per page seems to be a good rule of thumb.

The 8 novels in the Dark Tower series take up 4250 pages. By our rule of thumb, that would require more than 70 hours of screen time to cover.

I'll admit that the minute per page standard is not fair for adapting longer works. Once you get past 300 pages or so, I think you can throw a limiting curve into the formula, make it minutes per pages2 or something for that leg, then increase the superscript to 3 for all the pages after that.

As an example, The Stand miniseries from the 90's was fine, though Randall Flagg's curly mullet and all-denim Canadian Tuxedo didn't age well, but that's forgivable. I heard there is a newer miniseries, but I haven't seen it.

Back to the Dark Tower: from a reader's point of view, a 2 hour movie is egregiously short, and going into the movie, I knew that that was going to be the case, so I tried to have a baby mind and look at it purely as a film, without a literary history.

From that perspective, it was okay: decent popcorn movie, but forgettable in the long term.

I can see having a formula that converts a page of script to a minute of movie, but trying to convert a novel page to screen time is crazy talk. A novel is a much freer art form, and if the author wants to stop the narrative for, say, 200 pages describing the nuances of whaling, then that might not convert directly to the screenplay. jmo

Yeah, it's not a tit-for-tat metric, as in this scene lasts for 20 pages, so our movie equivalent will be around 20 minutes. It's not that. It's more of a way to size up a work before you adapt it.

The formula helps determine if the adaptation will be better off as a feature length movie, or if it will have to go into two movies: see the last Harry Potter book, the last Hunger Games book and so forth. Or maybe it would be better as a mini-series, or even as 2-3 seasons on Netflix or Amazon.

Of course, greed comes into play as well. More product = more money, which I believe had to be the baseline for the studio greenlighting 3 Hobbit movies.

Yeah that's a good and thoughtful take on it. I thought you prolly wouldn't like it cos it's easy to get disappointed when you read it in it's likely epicness (I haven't read it). I watched it on a plane not knowing anything about it, not knowing that it was an SK adaption, and quite liked it. I looked it up afterwards and was a bit surprised that it got mostly bad reviews but I can see where they are coming from...

If I were to make a movie from a book adaptation, I wouldn't use this method, but I can see how businesses trying to make a buck would like it. OTOH, I see flaws that lead me to believe there may be money to be made in the field.

Yeah I'm not married to the model; I just find it interesting.

Update on the Jeep: The shop is still waiting on delivery of a used transmission. It's going to be around 18 hundo for the job. Meanwhile, I've lost around 10 lbs walking to work for 2 weeks, so I have that going for me, which is nice.

Hopefully by next week I'll be back at the tables, and still running good at the football promo. The season is getting on, and I doubt that they'll have any promos afterwards that will be nearly as +EV.

In the meantime, I've been rereading the Dune series, and I have a few things to write about it, but I've also been drinking and playing video games out of boredom every night, so I'll have to carve a niche out of that activity and dedicate it to writing.

1800 for a new-used transmission sounds like a pretty good deal. My neighbor had to have one put in his pickup this summer, pretty sure he told me 4500.

Also nice on the weight loss. Keep it up, and weather and your body allow.

The last time I put in a new transmission was for a Ford F-100. Between the junkyard tranny and a new throw-out bearing, I was out ~ $35. That was a lot of beer in the 70s.

Another great new song from one of my favorite bands.



This one's an instrumental. Reminds me of one of the tracks that 70's artists like Rush, Jeff Beck and Edgar Winter used to lay down just to show off their virtuosity.

The used trans probably wasn't that expensive; but shipping it here by LTL freight (can't trust UPS or Fed Ex parcel not to smash up something that heavy) probably ran $300+, and then the extensive labor rounded out the last of it.

I credit my dad for spending a not insignificant number of hours when I was young, trying to teach me basic mechanical knowledge, but I never did possess the wiring for that, so I pay mechanics.

I had my Jeep back on Wednesday, but there was no football promo going on Thanksgiving. I'll be heading back to MGM tonight for the Green Bay vs Philly game.

Seems like I've been away from the tables for a long time, but in any case I was able to post a fair amount of non-poker content, and to justify not being shunted over to Poker Blogs.

Also, as a surprise, my bosses paid for the car work.

At my job, I'm basically a glorified sales clerk, with a few occasional purchasing, inventory management, and shipping/receiving add-ons, so they don't pay me a fortune, but they do practice non-infrequent random acts of kindness with me in mind, and that's a lovely perk.

Sheep likes I like this track too. Thanks for the rec! It reminds me of Eruption (Van Halen) and Cliffs of Dover (Eric Johnson). The latter is one of my favorite instrumental tracks of all time - trance not included.

Nice to hear of the company covering your Jeep repair. To me, it's that kind of thing that inspires employees to be better, not some bonus/raise.

Of course, extra $ doesn't hurt, but it was never my motivating factor.

Wow Sheep, it's been 20 years or more since I heard this little masterpiece. I used to hear it all over the rock stations; I can't imagine why the classic rock stations didn't pick it up. It's a beauty.



Thanks goddog! Agreed.

I did not play on Sunday, as I had a date with the bottle, at home. The football promo ends just before New Year, so I will endeavor to manage my time better for the next few Sundays.

Last night I ran like dog crap. i doubled up one player for $150 when he limped along/reraised from MP with AA and I spazzed over it with TT. In general, I give more credit to an open limp/reraise from EP, and not so much to a limp-along from MP. But Villain's clever plan worked on me that time.

Over the next hour, that player slowly gave away my chips, and ran himself back down to $150, at which point I doubled him up again when he over-flushed me. Another player hit a well-concealed straight on the river (the obvious draw was a front-door flush, which didn't come in) and led for a weak $30, which I raised to $100 with my middle set...snap. From the BB, I made a baby flush on the river multi-way and led for $50, a player in MP raised it to $125, and the SB shoved for $750. Goodbye $50.

I had started at one table that broke at halftime, then had moved to another. Both of them missed the football promo payouts entirely.

It was that kind of night. On the way out, I lost $45 on a Cashman Bingo game. Before my poker session, I had won $3 on Ultimate X Poker. At that point, the poker room had 4 of the Ultimate X machines. During my poker session, staff came along and converted 2 of the X machines to different, negative EV games.

Springfield MGM $1/$2 poker: 4 hours
(-$663.00)

Running Poker Total: 93 hours, +$3891.00

Springfield MGM Slots: 0.3 hours
(-$42.00)

Running Slot Total: 0.5 hours, +53.15

Grand Total: 93.5 hours, +$3944.15