Shine - Lauren Myracle [103]
My Abrams people! Y’all are so cool. Thank you thank you thank you for making my books exist. Michael J., I’ve not always made your professional life easy, but you just keep on supporting me anyway—and always with a smile. Maria, you are an artist, lady, and dang, am I lucky you were in charge of Shine’s cover art. It is stunning, as all of your work is. (And yes, manly Chad, I know she learned it all—well, almost all—from you.) Brett? You chat with me when Susan makes the slice-her-hand-across-her-neck silent gesture to you that means, “Tell her I’m not here!” As you are delightful to chat with, I do not mind at all—so thank you. To everyone in sales and marketing and publicity: My books would be invisible if not for y’all. I am so grateful not to be invisible. Mr. Scott Auerbach, you’re just plain funny, even when you don’t know you are. I love grammar, and I love the fact that you do, too. Tamar, I know you don’t work directly with me—you’ve got your own fab authors upon whom you lavish your attention—but you are very much part of my Abrams support group. Thank you for introducing me to great music, and thank you for helping me overcome my fear of skinny jeans. Maz, you are an artistic soul who is nonetheless able to handle the very scary details of, like, schedules and dates and events. I don’t know how you do it, but you do, and I am full of appreciation and awe.
Howard, Maggie, and Laura . . . hi! *waves enthusiastically* I sure do like y’all!
As for Jason and Susan, just hold yer horses, you two. I’ll be getting to y’all later . . .
Seth Viney, thanks for the exploding shoes. They were in the book, but my editor—ahem—made me take them out. Seth’s lovely wife, Terace? Omigosh. Thank you for sharing your stories so openly and courageously, and with such level-headedness. Also, good golly, thanks for helping me type in my revisions at the end of the Shine marathon!
Sara Hayden? Thank you for being my girl Friday. Along with Terace, you also helped me insert last-minute changes to the manuscript, and you did so brilliantly. Of course, you do everything brilliantly.
I need a lot of help getting through each day, and to that end, thanks to multiple sweetie-pie “assistants”: Chelsea Alles, Lauren Karbula, Amy Hayden, and Stephanie Swanson. You enrich my life while at the same time keeping my kids safe . . . and making my house look a whole lot better . . . and folding my laundry (omigod, thank you, LK!) . . . and giving me the inside scoop on all things “young adult” I ask you about. You are the youth of America! And with America in y’all’s hands, we’ll do just fine.
Yo, Ian Mahan. You kept me straight when it came to “guy” talk. Thanks. And yo yo yo to all my Starbucks pals. Y’all work at the best Starbucks in the whole world, and the reason it’s so great is because of y’all.
Jim Shuler, as always, thank you for telling how to hurt people—or rather, for telling me what would happen, medically, once a (fictional!) person gets hurt. And as always, anything I got wrong is on me.
Jim, thanks also for talking to me about guns, and I extend that thanks to my uncle, Jack Mitchell, and my neighbor, Dave Taylor. Dave, you used a straw to show me how one might pistol-whip someone . . . and you demonstrated on your wife, Pretty Jenny! So, Pretty Jenny (who is much more than simply pretty), thank you for letting your husband straw-whip you. Pretty Jenny, thank you even more for reading an early-early-embarrassingly-early draft of the novel, and for lying and saying nice things about it. You gave me encouragement when I desperately needed it—and you gave me great advice on how to make the novel better.
Early readers are invaluable, and along with Pretty Jenny, I thank Nina Romantio and Holly Warren for their insights. Y’all were awfully nice and supportive,