98.4
Page 23
I’m not through yet. At Hodders Elsie Herron got Philip Evans to plough through the scissors-and-paste version in great detail in order to infuriate me with unreasonable demands concerning such mundane items as story-logic and characterization; the Acland-Hoods gave me a crammer course on the identity of things like sycamores and rosebay (hitherto known to me as trees and weeds) and their gamekeeper Charlie Touchin showed me how foxhounds might be persuaded to track human prey for a change. Ridley Scott took a lot of time off from the movie business to decipher my first draft and make suggestions ‘without which ...’; and Deirdre put up with the blue murder of enduring my five a.m. routine, read through a load of British rubbish and somehow managed to retype it in ridiculously difficult circumstances when it looked as if it made some kind of sense. Elaine Greene squared me on American politics and rudely demanded that the technological content be intelligible to people without a Ph.D. — not that I suffer from academic dignity of this kind!
Otherwise I wrote this book single-handed. I hope you think it was worth it.
CHRISTOPHER HODDER-WILLIAMS 1969
If you enjoyed 98.4 check out FISTFUL OF DIGITS by Christopher Hodder-Williams here.
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