Listening to their publishing tales, learning from their insightful critiques and high on their encouragement, I began to allow myself to imagine my novel on a bookshelf.
Later in the 20th century, readers, listeners and viewers of detective tales learned about France from Simenon's Maigret and the Netherlands through Nicolas Freeling's Commissaris Van der Valk, who achieved the rare double of topping both the TV ratings lists (in the ITV series starring Barry Foster) and the pop charts, with the Simon Park Orchestra's recording of the theme tune, "Eye Level".
On cooler days, guests huddle around blazing cave fires to listen to ageless tales, learn the art of body painting and are encouraged to simply let the old legends seep freely into their consciousness.
Now that ice fishermen actually talk to each other and to strangers, nearly all of them have a tale about learning the craft from their fathers or grandfathers.
The personal history related by Mr. Joel, who was born in the Bronx and brought up in Hicksville, N.Y., is a tale of learning to roll with some heavy punches.
While Ben's tales of learning how to turn tricks in San Francisco may have a strong titillation factor (especially for those outside the Bay area who view San Francisco as a cesspool of hedonism), the sad truth is that his story is hardly new.
Better for him, he has Ms Coakley's cautionary tale to learn from.
We don't need to witness firsthand the horrors of "The Handmaid's Tale" to learn from that novel's political divisions.
In Mr. Ashanti's tale, he learns just before he leaves for basic training that the abusive man who he thought was his father isn't; a subplot of the rest of the show is his search for his biological father.
In another charming tale, we learn that developers are pretty upset with.NET 3.0 and they're even jumping ship, taking their mad skillz with them to Linux and other platforms.
