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

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.
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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 the day. I can crank out cheap, disposable forewords as quick as you please. It's as natural to me as saying, "Yes, I'd love another." Indeed, I even write forewords in my sleep nowadays, which to be perfectly honest yields some rather cheeky results. It's madness and exuberance all at once. In fact, I now prefer to not even read what I am discussing. I feel that