In 
<623574b8-3948-495f-80e9-413f0e215015@m33g2000pri.googlegroups.com>, 
RichD wrote:

<snip>
 

Who or what is Stone?

The Stones are a family of authors (much like the Brontes, although 
not as famous), the youngest and most celebrated of whom, Arthur J 
Stone, wrote a horror novel that had a certain vogue in the 1970s and 
which may have influenced the writers of cheap dial-a-vampire TV 
genre renderings of the 1990s and 2000s. Stone's most famous novel 
(and probably the most famous of /any/ Stone novel), it was full of 
werewolves zombies and ghouls and ghasts and ghosts and vampires and 
various other undead nasties and was, not surprisingly, entitled 
"Blood!".

This family of authors is perhaps less well-known than it truly 
deserves to be (for example, I can find no Wikipedia entry for /any/ 
of them) because they found it remarkably difficult to stick to 
publishing deadlines. Some authors can (or could) get away with this, 
such as Douglas Adams. But others can't. Publishers tend to have 
limited attention spans, and will only wait for so long before 
dismissing the absent manuscript from their minds and moving on to 
something more profitable (i.e. present).

Even Arthur J suffered from this difficulty with deadlines; his copy 
editor was the very soul of patience, but even she found the wait for 
his novel to be filled with frustration. As she said at the time, 
"it's like trying to get Blood out of a Stone".

-- 
Richard Heathfield <http://www.cpax.org.uk>
Email: -http://www. +rjh@
"Usenet is a strange place" - dmr 29 July 1999
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