Short Wave Sportfishing wrote:
On Sat, 10 Mar 2007 01:10:35 -0500, Wayne.B
wrote:

On Fri, 09 Mar 2007 17:01:57 GMT, Tom Francis
wrote:

I swear to you, we've discussed her articles ad nauseam - she cannot
deliver a 1000 word article in under 2500 words. :) Almost
everything she does has to be broken into two parts.

One time she sent me an article she did about some strange type of
skin cancer and asked me what I thought of it. I replied with my
usual "you've got to gut this and get to the point" so she challenged
me to gut it and still make it meaningful. She would submit both
pieces and see which one was accepted.

I did, I won and she didn't speak to me for two weeks. :)
Being paid by the word just might have an impact on your writing style
I suspect.

You probably cost her some serious $$$s.

Well, in her case, it's a question of being very, extremely and
incredibly smart and a deep researcher. When she gets on a roll, she
just doesn't know when to quit - everything is fair game.

I've often told her that what she really needs to do is return to
school and this time, take up medicine. :)

Charles Dickens was "paid by the word", in that all of his stories were
serialized and the longer he dragged out the story, the more he was
paid. It was very similar to the old Saturday movie serials where each
installment had a cliff hanger. What I find even more interesting is
since Dickens rarely was a few chapters ahead of the publications, he
would be able to see the public response to his story, and alter it
based upon their reaction. Todays equivalent of the movie "preview",
where the studios show different cuts and different endings to the same
movie.