Music critic Alex Ross scored one of the coveted 2008 MacArthur Foundation Genius Fellowships today. FishbowlNY landed an exclusive interview with Ross, asking the author of The Rest Is Noise how it feels to be one of 25 lucky thinkers who will now have 500,000 extra dollars to help them follow their scholarly pursuits.

If you were wondering what it takes to accomplish what Ross accomplished, the answer is simple: backbreaking amounts of brain-work. If you don't believe us, check out Ross' blog post from 2006, back when his award-winning book was a pile of manuscript pages:

"As of today, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century is exactly 250,000 words long ... I've met the goal I set for myself twenty months ago, when, having finished a rough draft, I ran it through Word Count and discovered to my horror that I had produced 390,000 words."

If you have a similarly daunting editing horror story, feel free to include it in the comments. Unfortunately, we can't hook you up with a MacArthur Grant.