Thank you to Orchard Hill Press for your extraordinary support of Disneylanders. I am so proud and honored to work with you, and I can't even begin to express my thanks for your belief in this book and your skills that made it a reality.
I never could have written a book without the teachers who made me love reading and writing: Frances Dickerson, Tom Lederer, and Cynthia Bates. My parents, Karen and Gary Pastoor, are also great teachers, and I thank them for a lifetime of support and encouragement, as well as many trips to Disneyland. Thank you to my grandmother Myrtle Gustafson for writing down my stories for me before I could write them myself.
Deepest thanks to the low-residency creative writing program at UC Riverside—Palm Desert and the instructors who advised me and helped me every step of the way: Elizabeth Crane, Mary Yukari Waters, David Ulin, and Tod Goldberg; I am so lucky to have been able to turn to you for guidance. Thank you to every single person at the UCRPDLRMFA program for endless cheerleading, for reading drafts, and for always knowing when to make me laugh, especially Natalia Cortes Chaffin and Shannon Purchase.
Thank you to Shaida Boroumand, Brooke Hall, Sara Larochette, Lindsey Lubbock, Allison Ping, and Rod Richards for reading my pages or for reading my mind and knowing when to say just the right thing to keep me going. Thank you, Rebecca Chastain, for your enthusiastic support from the very beginning.
And thank you to my husband, Brad. When my doctor forbade me to type because of an injury, Brad took my handwritten manuscript and typed it himself. Thank you to Brad and our son, Henry, for sacrificing hours of time together to let me write, edit, or sit and stare at the computer when needed; I am so incredibly grateful.