Acknowledgments

This book would not have come to be without the help of my agent, Hannah Bowman, who shepherded this novel through endless rounds of revisions – a couple of which turned out to be a burning down and rebuilding from the ground up (seventeen page edit letter!). It’s been great to have an agent involved in this process from pitch to proposal to publication day. Thanks, Hannah.

I’d also like to thank the folks at the Wellspring Writers’ Workshop, in particular Bradley Beaulieu and Gregory Wilson, for their detailed feedback on what I though was a polished manuscript, but turned out to be a very rough, very early draft. Thanks for wading through endless disconnected travelogues and peeling out all the good stuff. For feedback on later versions of the book, thanks go to Dave Zelasco.

There’s a lot of other invisible work that goes into bookmaking, and for that I have to thank my amazingly dedicated assistant, Danielle Horn Beal, who not only organized the entire wiki for this series but became the point-person for entering line edits on those numerous drafts and helping me collect, format and research work for ongoing projects while I kept my head down working on this. I would not have been able to manage such an extraordinary year of apparent productivity without her.

Copyeditors are another unsung hero of the business. Thanks to mine for this project, Richard Shealy, who was really the person we made that wiki for… I cherish all of my copyeditors, as it is a skill I sorely lack. Thanks for patience with the made-up plants and endless Robert-Howard-like word rep.

It also makes a huge difference at the publisher level when you have a true team at hand who’s both passionate about your work and great at what they do. Thanks to everyone on the Angry Robot team for giving this book a shot. Thanks to Amanda Rutter for a rather sobering edit that helped me enter the panicked state necessary to take the book to the next level. Thanks to Marc Gascoigne for the easiest cover development process ever (“Looks great, Marc! Carry on!”) and thanks to Caroline Lambe and Michael Underwood for tireless marketing and publicity support. I do not envy them their jobs, and wholly appreciate and understand the pressures they’re under to position and publicize so many books. Thanks, finally, to Lee Harris for taking the ultimate chance on this series. We’ll see how things wash out.

Living with a writer who is always talking about other worlds and fake people can be a chore, so thanks to Jayson Utz for endless plot and creepy worldbuilding conversations. “How about the swords sprout out of their wrists!?” is just one example of the kind stuff that pops up in these conversations and eventually makes it into the books. Thanks for all the fish.

I would also be remiss if I didn’t thank the science fiction and fantasy writing and reading community as a whole – agents, editors, fans, casual readers, and all – for supporting both me and my work through oftentimes grueling business entanglements and gut punches. It’s a tough business, and you all make it worth getting up again.