ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The following acknowledgements will most certainly miss multiple people of great importance… You have my sincerest apologies for the oversight and my deepest gratitude for your contributions.

I want to thank my wife and daughters for their patience and tolerating those times when I disappear into the solitude of my writing. They are both my reason for publishing and my surest ground when I need to return to reality. Josiah, you missed out on this book (aside from a few kicks from inside a pregnant belly), but I assure you, you’ll have your chance to get in on future acknowledgements.

I want to thank both Yelena Casale and Tina Moss for their help in editing the book and their belief in my voice. I hope this is the beginning of great things for all of us. I would be remiss not to include all the City Owl Press authors and the group Facebook discussion for their encouragement and inspiration.

I certainly did not invent the genre of urban fantasy. While I first met it in the works of C.S. Lewis, I owe a deep debt to Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Jim Butcher, and Laurell Hamilton for developing both the genre and my imagination. If my characters are half as real to the reader as Harry Dresden or Anita Blake are to me, then I am honored.

I owe a debt to those groups of gamers who let me practice and develop my storytelling voice and the individual names would overwhelm the size of this page. Whether it was in my home, yours, or at one of our live action settings, I thank you for the opportunity and hope you all had as much fun as I did. Tim and Joe, I owe special thanks to both of you.

A special thanks to Norman Public Schools for giving me the time that I needed to finish this project.