60,000 words or bust

My review of Voices From the Street, an early mainstream novel by Philip K. Dick, is now up at the L.A. Times site.



One of the fun parts of preparing this review was reading PKD ex-wife Anne's memoir, Search for Philip K. Dick, which I quote at the start of the piece. Here's another passage that I rather liked:

He said that the idea for a novel came to him in one intuitive flash, but he couldn’t tell me what the idea was “in under 60,000 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, and I’m very accurate.” One day he told me he typed sixty original manuscript pages without an error. He continued to tell me about this feat many times.


(Photo from the official Philip K. Dick site)