"Mike Resnick & David Gerrold - Jellyfish" - читать интересную книгу автора (Resnick Mike)

simplicities.

Many years ago, Filk had counted the words on his finished pages
and determined that he averaged two hundred words per page. From that
day on, he never typed more than four pages at a time.

Filk also understood that no human being was capable of writing a
new idea every eight hundred words. A human being was so simple, he or
she could only hold one idea at a time.

But Filk also knew that if he was a different per-son, then that different
person would be holding a different idea in his head. The answer was
simpleтАФand it was obvious. Hi-ho. You are a new person every day. See?
You are not the person you were the day before. So it goes. You are the
person whose experience includes the day before, so you are different
from a person whose experience does not include the day before. Of
course.

So Filk would carefully type his four pages, con-sume some
chemicals, and lie back down on his dirty sheets until hunger or thirst or the
pressing needs of his bladder caused him to rise again. Usu-ally a single
diurnal cycle. Although once, after a particularly crucifying experience, it had
taken him three days to rise again.

Filk had no loyalty to the past, as he was not that person anymore, so
he never picked up a pre-vious train of thought, always starting a new one.
As a result, his writing had a peripatetic style and pace that few other
authors could match.
 Or understand.

Every hundred and twenty days, give or take a few, allowing for the
occasional bouts of physical incapacity, Filk would have accumulated four
hundred pages of text, give or take some number divisible by four. On that
day, as if blinking awake from a long sleep, Filk would dutifully type a title in
the center of a blank page and put that at the front of the stack; he would
type тАЬthe endтАЭ in the center of another blank page and put that at the back
of the stack. He never made up a title until the book was finished; because
until it was fin-ished, he did not know what it was about.

Then Filk would put the stack of pages into a box, and take the box to
the local office supply store and have two copies made. He would also buy
two more reams of paper and a new type-writer ribbon. On his way home,
he would stop at the post office and mail one copy to himself as insurance,
and another to his publisher in New York.

FilkтАЩs publisher was a man named Thorbald Helmholtz, the owner and
operator of Helmholtz Publishing, Ltd. Like most publishers, Helmholtz was
a thief. On receipt of the manuscript, Helmholtz would write a check for
$2,500 to Dil-lon K. Filk and drop it into the mail the very same day. Without
actually reading the work for its con-tent, Helmholtz would copy-edit it for