"[Phil] was a fluent writer, and his work came easily to him. He said that the idea for a novel came in one intuitive flash, but he couldn't tell it 'in under sixty thousand words. The words come out of my hands, not my brain. I write with my hands. I type 160 words a minute, the rate of a really good legal secretary.' One day he told me that he had typed sixty original manuscript pages without an error."--From Anne R. Dick's Search for Philip K. Dick, 1928-1982 (Point Reyes Cypress Press). Dick's biographer, Lawrence Sutin, notes that in 1963 and 1964, Dick wrote eleven novels, eleven stories, two essays, two extended plot treatments, as well as "hundreds of letters and God knows what all else that may have been lost or destroyed along the way."
(Fourteenth in a series. Won't make it to 15 this calendar year, but hey, 14's not bad, right?)
Photo: copyright Nicole Panter.
