The Book of Wesley
Preface
J. WESLEY ALLEN was a character created in my first novel, Behind the Ivory Veil which was finally released in 2017 under the author pseudonym Devon Layne. I’d proudly finished the manuscript first draft in 1979 and gave it to a trusted friend to read. He handed it back (all 120 pages) and pronounced it “Freeze-dried. If you added a little hot water it would be a whole book.”
Walking home that night I started going over all the questions I would ask of this character if I were interviewing him. I clearly heard him say, “If you’d shut up, I’d tell you how the world is. The entirety of that which exists has being only because it has been remembered…” Thus began The Book of Wesley. It was the first time (but certainly not the last time) one of my characters took over a conversation in my head and basically ignored me from that point on.
I penned Wesley’s thoughts in a journal and used that as a starter kit for regular ‘Poets and Philosophers’ meetings at which I sat around with a number of friends, smoking our pipes, drinking cognac, and thinking deep thoughts. No doubt the poets and philosophers influenced Wesley’s thinking as much as he did theirs.
The five volumes of thoughts were written and published between 1979 and 1986 and I published each little volume with a brief forward. The hundred copies were distributed to friends, relatives, and anyone else I could get to take one. And then they were forgotten.
In 2013, I set out on a journey around the country that still continues. As of 2020, I’ve been in forty-six states, three Canadian provinces, and sixteen other countries. And along the way, I wrote. I happened to pull the original The Book of Wesley journal out of a storage bin and decided to publish it online for the first time. As I transcribed the original manuscript, I posted it in a blog with occasional editorial comments. I tried not to change anything in the original manuscript other than correcting spellings, punctuation, and occasional grammar—like any editor would do. I posted that version in 2013-14. Unfortunately, if you open the blog, the posts are in reverse order of the way it was written, being most recent first. Difficult to follow along.
This year, with the publication of the third volume of Devon Layne’s “The Props Master” series, A Touch of Magic, I decided to publish The Book of Wesley in a more readable format on my own website and this 2020 third edition is the result. It has also given me an opportunity to revisit some of the thoughts I credited to Wesley—mostly because I didn’t want to be blamed for them myself. I continued the standard of not changing Wesley’s thoughts, though I hope that in forty years my own have matured and improved.
I’m still just as likely to speak authoritatively on subjects I know nothing about.
Perhaps one day, Wesley will speak again.
Nathan Everett, editor
September 7, 2020
Also read The Props Master series by Devon Layne!
The Props Master Prequel: Behind the Ivory Veil
The Props Master 1: Ritual Reality
The Props Master 2: A Touch of Magic
Coming soon: The Props Master 3: Child of Earth
Comments
Please feel free to send comments to the author at nathan@nathaneverett.com.
