In the summer of 1999, King was in the middle of writing On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. He had finished the memoir section and had abandoned the book for nearly eighteen months, unsure of how or whether to proceed. King says that it was the first book that he'd abandoned since writing The Stand decades earlier. He had just decided to continue the book and on June 17 wrote a list of questions he was frequently asked about writing; on June 18, he wrote four pages of the section on writing.On June 19, at about 4:30 PM, he was walking on the right shoulder of Route 5 in Center Lovell, Maine. Driver Bryan Smith, distracted by an unrestrained Rottweiler named Bullet, moving in the back of his 1985 Dodge Caravan, struck King, who landed in a depression in the ground about 14 feet from the pavement of Route 5.Oxford County Sheriff's deputy Matt Baker recorded that witnesses said the driver was not speeding or reckless.Baker also reported that King was struck from behind. King's official website, however, states that this was incorrect, and that King was walking facing traffic. In any case, Smith was turned and leaning to the rear of his vehicle trying to restrain his dog, and was not watching the road when he struck King.
King was conscious enough to give the deputy phone numbers to contact his family but was in considerable pain. King also mentioned in an interview that he told a paramedic he knew he was going into shock — and he knew very well what shock was because he wrote about horrible injuries all the time and asked the paramedic if it was as bad as it looked to him. The author was first transported to Northern Cumberland Hospital in Bridgton and then flown by helicopter to Central Maine Hospital in Lewiston. His injuries — a collapsed right lung, multiple fractures of the right leg, scalp laceration, and a broken hip — kept him in Central Maine Medical Center until July 9, almost three weeks later.Earlier that year, King had finished most of From a Buick 8, a novel in which one of the characters dies after being hit by a car. Of the eerie similarities, King says that he tries "not to make too much of it." Certainly car accidents and their horrors had figured into King's work before. His 1987 novel Misery also concerned a writer who experiences severe injuries in an auto accident, and auto wrecks figure prominently in The Dead Zone and Thinner. In Christine a 1958 Plymouth Fury runs down its enemies (though, contrary to prevalent rumours, Christine was not in fact based on a car that King himself had formerly owned). King wrote a segment for the movie Creepshow 2 in which a driver is followed by the bloodied hitchhiker she ran down. 1994's Insomnia has a main character struck dead by a car, and central to the plot in Pet Sematary is the scene in which the young son of the protagonist is struck and killed by a tractor-trailer. Following the accident, King wrote Dreamcatcher, in which a central character suffers injuries similar to King's own after being struck by a car.
The series premiere of Stephen King's Kingdom Hospital involved the main character, a painter out for a morning run, being hit by a pickup truck, and was also inspired by the accident. In fact the scene was depicted in a way remarkably similar to that in which he described his real accident occurring, the only exception being that the driver in the show was driving drunk in addition to trying to restrain his dog.After five operations in ten days and physical therapy, King resumed work on On Writing in July, though his hip was still shattered and he could only sit for about forty minutes before the pain became intolerable.King's lawyer and two others purchased Smith's van for $1,500, reportedly to avoid it appearing on eBay. The van was later crushed at a junkyard, though King mentioned during an interview with Fresh Air's Terry Gross that he wanted to destroy the vehicle with a sledgehammer.[6] Smith, a disabled construction worker, died of an overdose of pain medication on September 21, 2000 (King's birthday) at the age of 43.King incorporated his accident into the final novel of his Dark Tower series, in which the hero Roland Deschain and his ka-tet prevent a fictionalized version of King from being fatally injured by the van. In the story, Roland hypnotized both King and Bryan Smith in order to make them forget his appearance.
Recent years
In 2000, King published a serialised Novel "The Plant" over the internet and bypassed print publication. Sales were unsuccessful and the project was abandoned. In 2002, King announced he would stop writing, apparently motivated in part by frustration with his injuries, which had made sitting uncomfortable, and reduced his stamina."I'm writing but I'm writing at a much slower pace than previously and I think that if I come up with something really, really good, I would be perfectly willing to publish it because that still feels like the final act of the creative process, publishing it so people can read it and you can get feedback and people can talk about it with each other and with you, the writer, but the force of my invention has slowed down a lot over the years and that's as it should be. I'm not a kid of 25 anymore and I'm not a young middle-aged man of 35 anymore — I'm 55 years old and I have grandchildren, two new puppies to house-train and I have a lot of things to do besides writing and that in and of itself is a wonderful thing but writing is still a big, important part of my life and of everyday."
King's home
Since 2003, King has provided his take on pop culture in a column appearing on the back page of Entertainment Weekly, usually every third week. The column is called "The Pop Of King", a reference to "The King of Pop", Michael Jackson.In October 2005, King signed a deal with Marvel Comics, to publish a seven-issue, miniseries spinoff of The Dark Tower series called The Gunslinger Born. The series, which focuses on a young Roland Deschain, is plotted by Robin Furth, dialogued by Peter David, and illustrated by Eisner Award-winning artist Jae Lee. The first issue was published on February 7, 2007, and because of its connection with King, David, Lee, and Marvel Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada appeared at a midnight signing at a Times Square, New York comic book store to promote it. The work had sold over 200,000 copies by March 2007.
In June 2006, King appeared on the first installment of Amazon Fishbowl, a live web-program hosted by Bill Maher.King, a long time supporter of small publishing, has recently allowed the publication of two past novels in limited edition form. The Green Mile and Colorado Kid will receive special treatment from two small publishing houses. Both books will be produced and be signed by both King and the artist contributing work to the book. Half of King's published work has been re-published in limited (signed) edition format.On February 14, 2007, Joblo.com announced that plans were underway for Lost creator J. J. Abrams to do an adaptation of King's epic Dark Tower series.In June 2007, King will publish the novel Blaze, which was written in the early '70s, under his long-time pseudonym Richard Bachman. He is also finishing the novel Duma Key and writing a play with John Mellencamp titled Ghost Brothers Of Darkland County.
On April 20, 2007, Entertainment Weekly asked King if he felt there was a correlation between Seung-Hui Cho's writing and the Virginia Tech massacre. King stated, "Certainly in this sensitized day and age, my own college writing would have raised red flags, and I'm certain someone would have tabbed me as mentally ill because of them" and "Cho doesn't strike me as in the least creative, however. Dude was crazy. Dude was, in the memorable phrasing of Nikki Giovanni, 'just mean.' Essentially there's no story here, except for a paranoid a--hole who went DEFCON-1." King felt that Cho's work had issues because of its themes and the lack of writing ability and a meaningful story.
In the late 1970s-early 1980s, after becoming a popular horror writer, King published a handful of novels — Rage (1977), The Long Walk (1979), Road Work (1981), The Running Man (1982), and Thinner (1984) — under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. The idea behind this was largely an experiment to measure for himself whether or not he could replicate his own success again, and allay at least part of the notion inside his own head that popularity might all be just an accident of fate.But there's another part that suggests it's all a lottery, a real-life game-show not much different from Wheel of Fortune or The New Price Is Right (two of the Bachman books, incidentally, are about game-show-type competitions). It is for some reason depressing to think it was all -- or even mostly -- an accident. So maybe you try to find out if you could do it again."The Bachman novels contained hints to the author's actual identity that were picked up on by fans, leading to King's admission of authorship in 1985. King dedicated his 1989 book The Dark Half about a pseudonym turning on a writer to "the deceased Richard Bachman", and in 1996, when the Stephen King novel Desperation was released, the companion novel The Regulators carried the Bachman byline.
In 2006, during a London UK press conference, King declared that he had discovered another Bachman novel, titled Blaze. It will be published on June 12, 2007 in the UK and US. In fact, the manuscript had been held at King's alma mater, the University of Maine in Orono for many years and had been covered by numerous King experts. King completely rewrote the 1973 manuscript for its publication.