I would imagine old injuries drive him from Maine winters. The cold of some climes seems to settle in bones and those with breaks or metal pinch hard the nerves. We rarely make it as far as the Keyes but tend to wander the coast in search of something new in early November as the hotels are near empty and you get the pick of rooms plus beaches are your own. The last trip we got to see a huge turtle off the beach of Saint George Island. Common miracles abound though I did talk to a local who claimed never to have seen one in his life there. If there is one thing I envy anyone it is time to explore. It is a spectacular world full of interesting things and people and I would like to meet them all.
This is not about his injuries, but the part I highlighted from the interview made me laugh:
"Well, my categorization is also about character, and the number of characters. Innies tend to be about one person and go deeper and deeper into a single character.
Lisey’s Story, my new novel, is an innie, for instance, because it’s a long book and there are only a few characters, but a book like
Cell is an outie because there are a lot of people and it’s about friendship and it’s kind of a road story.
Gerald’s Game is the innie-est of all the innie books. It’s about only one person, Jessie, who’s been handcuffed naked to her bed. The little things all get so big—the glass of water, and her trying to get the shelf above the bed to tip up so she can escape. Going into that book, I remember thinking that Jessie would have been some sort of gymnast at school, and at the end of it she would simply put her feet back over her head, over the bedstead, and wind up standing up.
About forty pages into writing it, I said to myself, I’d better see if this works. So I got my son—I think it was Joe because he’s the more limber of the two boys—and I took him into our bedroom. I tied him with scarves to the bedposts. My wife came in and said, What are you doing? And I said, I’m doing an experiment, never mind.
Joe tried to do it, but he couldn’t. He said, My joints don’t work that way. And again, it’s what I was talking about with the rabies in
Cujo. I’m saying, Jesus Christ! This isn’t going to work! And the only thing you can do at that point is say, Well, I could make her double-jointed. Then you go, Yeah, right, that’s not fair.
Misery was just two characters in a bedroom, but
Gerald’s Game goes that one better—one character in a bedroom. I was thinking that eventually there’s going to be another book that will just be called “Bedroom.” There won’t be any characters at all."
I can just picture him doing this - poor Joe!