I think the saying is that the sweetest sound anyone can hear is the sound of their own name. Not sure who said that – probably Dale Carnegie. I’ll refine the idea to say that the sweetest sound a writer can hear is their own work described with clarity, intelligence, and insight.
Which made yesterday about as sweet a day as could be asked for – I received the draft of the foreword for my upcoming short story collection Stages of Sleep from my friend Dr. Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. In addition to being a fine writer who has penned, co-penned, or edited some twenty books (many of them about science fiction and horror in our culture), Kevin is one of the cleverest and best-educated people I know – he earned his Doctorate in Theatre Arts and went on to get an M.A. in Theology, I guess, just for the hell of it. If I was on the track of a quality collection, he was one of the best-equipped people in my life to tell me so.
The foreword he has delivered is a squarely-argued gush that not only manages to quote both Plato and Styx, but spots a running thread of masculinity struggling to define itself within modernity, and then finds time to make a drive-by compliment to my acting. The smile it put on my face was bordering censorable. I won’t re-print the entire thing here, but here’s a quote that, if you know me, you can just imagine my reaction:
Nick does not just tell stories; he tells stories about people telling stories. He recognizes the importance of narrative and the stories we tell each other as meaning-making activities in our lives. As you read, note how many times a character narrates a story that is important within the story Master Thurkettle is telling. He gives us a series of Russian nesting dolls of narrative that reminds me from time to time of Neil Gaiman.
This was the last bit of text to plug into the manuscript; so now I can make arrangements with the editor to start cleaning it up to prepare it for publication. Strange and wonderful that, just last year, my first book was slowly gestating from ambition into reality; and here I am with Book #2 steadily coming to life, and Book #3 slated to start drafting tomorrow. This could be habit-forming.