If you're on a Steven King kick and feel like continuing, The Long Walk is a fantastic short novel that has stuck with me for 10 years +. Actually, it was published during his Richard Bachman pseudonym years like the Running Man, and the entire collection "The Bachman Books" is quite excellent. I'm a huge closet Steven King fan. At one point ~5-10 years ago I'd read his entire (very extensive) collection. I read On Writing, but it didn't resonate at the time. Maybe I'd do better with it now.

My favorite book of all time is The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein, and I never miss a chance to plug it. ;)

(I was admiring your font and just inspected it to find it was Georgia. Of course it is. I love Georgia.)

I read The Stand like 10 years ago, which was excellent. I picked up On Writing recently and read that, and I got Running Man and Dead Zone to see the principles he wrote about in On Writing in action. You know, the most stunning thing to me about it was how sloppy some parts of the books were, but it didn't matter. Take Dead Zone, for instance - fascinating premise, four or five really captivating chapters (the first three, and then two more blended into the book), and then... the rest was just okay. King even seemed to "run out of gas" at the end: the book ended with kind of a whimper, like he got sick of writing it and just finished it. But y'know what? It was a bestseller. Hooray for shipping, eh?

Again, it reminds me of the Equal Odds rule:

The equal-odds rule says that the average publication of any particular scientist does not have any statistically different chance of having more of an impact than any other scientist's average publication. In other words, those scientists who create publications with the most impact, also create publications with the least impact, and when great publications that make a huge impact are created, it is just a result of "trying" enough times.

I'll check out Heilein sometime, I actually bought Strangers in a Strange Land last year in Los Angeles, but didn't get around to reading it and now it's in a box in a closet halfway around the world from me. I'll add Moon to my reading list though, cheers for the recommendation.