Dr. Lewis B. Turndevelts Big Book of Forewords | Page 5

around the schoolyard about the house up on the hill owned by a madman who has built his own time machine from discarded engines off '68 Cobra Jet Mustangs. Well, I won't deny them as false - primarily because they're more exciting than the truth, and good stories should live on - but it does hit at the double-edged blessing and curse of the trade. Foreword writers are just famous enough to be misunderstood oddities, but not obscure enough to just be left alone.
I hope this new book will help to straighten out and clean up that mess. I fully expect that once people have the opportunity to experience the power and grace of a whole collection of forewords, instead of just the random one here and there, that this misunderstood but necessary art form will finally be thrust into the limelight of public conscience to be scrutinized and defined and appreciated once and for all. I'm also glad that I can be the catalyst for this change. I am willing to give up my own personal privacy to the benefit of this greater good. I am sure that at first the constant interviews and media attention will feel strangely narcissistic and pretentious... but I'll get over it. It's a small sacrifice to make in order to receive so much understanding from the world.
But once people have come to terms with the what and why of forewords, they will eventually get down to the who. Who are these writers? And more importantly, who am I? Who do I think that I am? Who has written treatises on who I probably think that I am? Who further has editorialized those treatises with the so forth and the so on? These are all excellent questions.
Instead of answering them directly - please, let me keep a shred of mystery for the media hounds to sniff out - I would like to give you the brief synopsis of my literary journey, told not through lyric prose but instead through the broken stuttering of the common man.
1962. It was a harsh winter in South Carolina. However, seeing as I lived in South Dakota, I only gave it a casual thought. Personally, I've always been of the opinion that once a country has so many states that you have to further break them up into geographical namesakes, well, that's just too much of a good thing. But still geography intrigued me as far as I needed it to, and being a fellow "Southerner" I was busy keeping up with the regional home of my favorite author, Jesse L. Butterfield. As a young lad I would spend hours and hours during that and many other snowbound weekends poring over Butterfield's work. They were rich and satisfying crime novels. And there were only two of them. And I was not the best reader in school. But these books captivated me, each centered on the small town dealings of an honorable cop in the corrupt, seedy underbelly of rural South Carolina. His tales were populated with interesting and bizarrely idiosyncratic characters (read: suspects), all with sinister motives, and all spouting severely flamboyant backwoods Southern-isms, such as "You'uns coppers t'aint ne'er gonna step foot one on my property, no how!"
So I guess you could say that reading that sentence is what made me decide to become a writer. But I didn't just rush right into it. No sir, that's not how things are done in South Dakota. In fact, I purposefully decided to wait many years until just the right time to begin honing my craft, and in the meantime determined that it was best to simply begin building life experiences about which to later novelize. In fact, I made a list of things that seemed to be essential fodder for book writing, for quaint and nostalgic flashbacks, and planned out the next few years of my life in order to fit them all in and keep myself on a schedule. Some of the many activities that I willingly took part in for the sake of the greater literary good included: 1. A traumatic and short-lived career in little league baseball, complete with catching my first and only centerfield fly ball with my head. 2. A science experiment gone horribly wrong that culminated in a brief expulsion from school, and afflicted my lab partner with a lazy eye. 3. Letting two friends talk me into throwing rocks at passing cars, one of which turned out to be my Mom's. 4. An awkward first kiss behind the gym at school, interrupted by her swiftly moving hand to my cheek, followed by the words "I said 'no', now leave me alone." 5. Whining for five weeks about how I simply had to have the latest fad tennis shoes, only to realize just