Dr. Lewis B. Turndevelts Big Book of Forewords | Page 9

way meant to
cast any ill light upon truck stops, but you have to admit that they seem
to be the only retail outlets that buy these items in bulk).
I wish him the best. This mighty task is not without its share of toil and
heartache, but it can also occasionally provide the warm embrace of
satisfaction. But I fear for the profession as a whole. Have we allowed
the art to become watered down to the point where it's acceptable for
the first thing you see inside a book cover to be a crude foreword that
somehow tries to find it's humor by quoting a bumper sticker? Perhaps
we have. And I throw the blame for this squarely on someone else's
shoulders, because I have moved on.
Dr. Turndevelt, I wish you well. May your forewords be long and
generous, and may the books they accompany shed new light on all
manner of Southern cuisine, lawnmower repair, and the history of
plastic surgery. May your rambling thoughts and meandering anecdotes
be sutured up by some well-meaning editor who is most definitely
underpaid and underappreciated. Continually strive to surround
yourself with an elaborate support system of researchers, managers and
others who can keep your backside safely away from the fire.
Forewords are not particularly tricky business, but I'm sure you will do
your best to make them appear that way.
********************

Re: Foreword By Elliott L. Cranwreath
I am a friendly and caring man. I have six cats, three pigeons, twelve
pet mice and fourteen cousins - if you take into account several distant
family members that I have only had the occasion to meet at infrequent,
reunion-oriented gatherings - and none of them receive beatings by me,
and in turn none of them has tried, successfully anyway, to eat one of
the other members of this group. So I pride myself in an overall civility
that governs my actions, and a more often than not functioning moral
compass that renders the thought of incivility detestable in most
circumstances. Therefore, it is with the greatest of restraint that I feel
compelled to voice my opinions on the somewhat sad occasion of not
being selected to write the foreword to this book. As a personal favor
from the author I have been given this space to express concern with
this decision, and to hopefully avoid a similar occurrence in future
works. As such, I am not being paid, which I feel affords me the liberty
to properly speak my mind on the matter without filtering it down to
placate some with the checkbook and others with the editorial pen.
With that said, I would like to "dive right in" as the youngsters are
saying these days - or at least they were, the last time I bothered to
check in with them - to the subject at hand.
I am, by trade, a writer. A bloody good one at that, if I might be
allowed the opportunity to toot my own whistle, as it were. I have been
scribbling pen on paper for the better part of thirty years, and the worse
part of twelve. I wouldn't so much say that I have a niche in the writing
world, as I aim to excel at whatever the task at hand happens to be (the
ones that help pay for the more expensive bottles of scotch that are the
staple of any good writer. These are items which I might not normally
be able to afford, at times leaving me with the cheaper,
two-month-aged substitutes that hardly seem worth the effort to portion,
although that has never stopped me before... but I do digress). I guess if
one were to weigh, and I do mean that in the literal sense, the various
types of vignettes and treatises that I have penned over the years, one
might be justified in saying that the overall winner, in terms of word
volume and weight in kilos, would have to be ceded to that of
forewords to books. I would have to go back and actually count them

all in order to give you a number with any amount of certainty, but if I
had to guess I would put them somewhere in the five hundred range.
This may seem like a grand amount to the uninitiated, but the sheer
volume of romance novels that are written every year would alone keep
someone like me in business indefinitely. Granted, I am not usually
asked to preface anything that refined, but I think the example gets the
point across.
But what I'm trying to say is that I am a professional at this sort of thing.
I've done it before and I'll bloody well do it again. I can sculpt a deep,
thoughtful foreword on grave matters of