Back in my pulp-mag days I worked from about 8:30 to noon, took an hour off for lunch, and worked again from one to three, for a work day of five and a half hours or so. I wrote 20 to 30 pages of copy in that time, doing it all first draft, so that I was able to produce a short story of 5000-7500 words in a single day. If I had 3000-worders to do, I usually wrote one before lunch and one after lunch. At three o'clock I poured myself a shot of rum or mixed a martini, put a record on, and sat down to relax until dinnertime, reading and perhaps sketching out the next day's work on a scrap of paper. This was the Tuesday-to-Friday routine. I never worked on Saturday or Sunday. On Monday I made the rounds of the editorial offices to visit some mix of John Campbell, Howard Browne, Larry Shaw, W.W. Scott, and Bob Lowndes—editors of Astounding, Amazing, Infinity/Science Fiction Adventures, Super Science Fiction, and the various Lowndes titles—to deliver the previous week's work. Sometimes I stopped off at my agent's Fifth Avenue office to pick up checks, also. (I took the subway downtown from my apartment on West End Avenue in Manhattan.) In weeks when I was writing a novel, I followed a five-day schedule, doing about thirty pages a day, so a typical Ace novel would take me six or seven days to write. I produced a lot of copy that way—a million words a year, or more—and since nearly all of it was contracted in advance, I didn't have to worry about rejections very much. (Now and then I would aim a story at Campbell or Gold or Boucher, where nothing was guaranteed in advance, and if they turned it down I delivered it to one of the lesser magazines, which bought it. Nothing went unsold for long.)
Boudiou! West End Avenue! J'avais oublié l'adresse. J'y ai passé quelques jours en 1977 (non, pas chez Silverbob)... [Mode subite attaque de nostalgie off] O______o
# posted by Anonyme : mardi 26 janvier 2010 à 15:04:00 UTC+1
30 pages par jour...Moi ça m'impressionne.
# posted by fred : mercredi 27 janvier 2010 à 10:46:00 UTC+1