Never-Ending Stories

From the New York Times (*), a piece that reminded me of the late Douglas Adams on how he loves deadlines, especially the whooshing noise they make as they go by.

“But there is another category of writer, one for whom the laws of space and time seem to disappear altogether. Years bleed into one another as file cabinets bulge with extraneous information. Sentences are committed and retracted. Pages stack up — or don’t. A decade passes, and the end of the tunnel remains dark. Only by scratching away the layers of Liquid Paper on the line of the contract reading ”delivery date,” as if it were an instant lottery ticket, is it possible to ascertain when exactly the manuscript was first due.”

(Dedicated to some of my favourite writers. All I have to say to Messieurs Joshi, Chandra, Friese and Kesavan is get on with the novel(s), boys, the Babu’s running out of reading material here.)