1/? Long as I am here, I want to talk a bit about writing method. The correct writing method is WHATEVER WORKS FOR YOU. That is the whole of the law.

People talk a lot about rewriting and revising. Maybe. Maybe not. It depends on you and how you’re wired...

Here is Theodore Sturgeon, the best sf/f writer (purely as writer) ever, talking about his method. This was fueled by a lot of childhood trauma, but it was what he did...

3/ (skipped adding numeral 2, but wtf)

I'm also pretty much a one-draft writer. You can see this from comparison of draft and final for my recent story, "My Hypothetical Friend"...

4/ There are differences (besides Ted being better than me, I mean). He was a Big Bang writer; I'm a steady-state writer. I've written every day since the end of January, doing not quite a thousand words a day of longhand. Now the typing is catching up...

5/ Ted's 10,000 words in a day were notorious. So were his long dry spells. Horace Gold, who ran Galaxy, said, "I know Sturgeon can write a novel in 3 days, but WHICH three days?"

Me? I just blorp along, and eventually things get done...

6/ I suspect desperation and dexedrine focused Ted so he could write that great first-draft copy.

With me, I suspect the focus is an Asperger's thing. Amphetamines are not my drug of choice, though I find caffeine useful. But I would not have been able to do what I've done...

7/ ...if I weren’t able to do it right or very nearly right the first time. Kipling said

There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays
And every single one of them is right!

Believe it. It’s true. Find yours. /end

8/ An afterthought. Note that Sturgeon is talking about getting 4¢/word in the early 1950s, when this was written. Short-fiction pay hasn’t come close to keeping up with inflation in the lifetime since.

9/ One more afterthought...Sturgeon did write at least one novel in three days: I, Libertine, a stunt connected to a 1950s NYC radio program. Or he wrote almost all of it. Betty Ballantine, the publisher, finished it after he passed out. It’s...not half bad.