stats, cont.

[Paul DiFilippo]

I stand second to none in my admiration for VINELAND, and of 
course the omission was inadvertant.  Chalk it up to too much
grappa, lack of sleep, or accumulated dope smoke.  Luckily,
including the missing wordage merely boosts my argument.  If
we include another 75K or so across TRP's 33-year career, then he 
obviously gets to claim another 2K words or so per year, raising
his annual average to about 27K words of finished prose.  Now,
Ray Bradbury likes to claim that during the prime of his career,
he strove for 1000 words/day.  Obviously by this standard, TRP
is a complete slacker.  But maybe he does 1000 words a day but
just has a tougher filter than Bradbury.  In any case, 27K per year
amounts to an average-sized novel every three years.  Would we as
readers be any happier or luckier--would literature be any 
luckier?--if TRP had indeed turned out one COL49-sized book
every three years instead of following the tack he has indeed 
chosen?  We should stop griping about the paucity of TRP material!

--
DiFi&Newton/2 Poplar/Prov., RI 02906/Vox: 401-751-0139
"I have almost nothing in common with myself"--Franz Kafka
"I do the best imitation of myself."  Ben Folds Five