Normally I just run a quote, but this one requires a bit of set-up.In 1977, Dean Koontz sold a thriller called Strike Deep to Dial Press to be published under the pseudonym "Anthony North." Not long after, his editor at Dial called him with a strange request. Seems another book had dropped out of the schedule, and they needed Strike Deep to fill the slot. And they needed it in six weeks. Finished, edited, revised... all in six weeks. Koontz, being the stone cold pro, agreed, despite this being 1977, long before you could e-mail a Word doc to your editor.
As Koontz explained it to biographer Katherine Ramsland:
"So week by week I would write like the infinite number of monkeys typing away, and every Friday morning, we drove to New York, three and a half hours away. At some point before we got there, I'd pull off. Gerda would take over the car and she'd drive to Dag Hammarskjold Plaza. I'd leap out with the pages while she circled the block. I'd run into the editor's office and give him the pages and he'd give me the past week's pages with editing notes, and we'd drive home. And that day would be shot. I'd spend Saturday revising anything that had to be revised, and start the next batch. And that's the way it went until it was done."
Later, Koontz's agent asked the editor if he was interested in another Anthony North thriller. The editor said no, telling the agent he'd been disappointed in Strike Deep. When the agent pressed for more details, the editor responded: "It felt rushed."
--from Katherine Ramsland's Dean Koontz: A Writer's Biography (HarperCollins, 1997).
(Twenty-first in a series.)
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