I am especially grateful to my much-loved friends Tera Freedman and Jenny Lemper, both of whom took me on scouting expeditions around San Francisco Bay to locate suitable mermaid habitats. (Tera brought me to the encampment at Islais Creek, and Jenny showed me Mare Island.) The sailors hanging out at the Bay View Boat Club offered dubious information (“There’s a pod of whales out there, and they dance on their tails in the moonlight!”) but charming company. The Monterey Bay Aquarium was both thrilling and extremely helpful in forming a mermaid’s-eye-view of the area. And my wonderful husband, Todd Polenberg, first suggested that a blockade of the Golden Gate might be an effective strategy for mermaids in trouble.
In addition to the sources already mentioned in the acknowledgments for Waking Storms, I am indebted to Wendy Williams’s book Kraken for giving me an entirely new appreciation of squids.