Dennis Hollingsworth

Such is the Life

On the topic of studio angst, the first and last paragraphs to bookend " Automated Storyteller
The curse of the prolific author
By Andre Mayer :

We have this enduring mental image of the author at work. He or she is sequestered in their den, hunkered in front of a typewriter. (The computer has been a tremendous boon to writers, but there?s just no romance in the phrase ?word processor.?) The cigarette on their lips has smouldered to the filter, they?re nursing their sixth cup of coffee and struggling to craft a sentence that won?t cause them to throw up their hands in futility and jettison the page to the wastepaper basket. Such is the life of an artist: intense, grueling and without exception, an ordeal...

Then he winds it up with this:

...George Murray, a poet and co-editor of the literary blog Bookninja.com, sees the near-annual release of a new Stephen King novel as ?the literary equivalent of watching a skinny Japanese dude scarf down 100 hot dogs in an eating contest; you are kind of grossed out, but gotta hand it to him.? Murray harbors a unique theory about what distinguishes a genre writer like King from a so-called serious artist like Joyce Carol Oates. ?It seems with Oates the hotdog eater is a performance artist commenting on the nature of consumption and American hegemony,? Murray avers. ?With King it?s just a guy eating 100 hot dogs, then looking like he?s going to die of nitrate poisoning.?