Fauxsaurus

Annotations: Acknowledgments

Note: This page is a work in progress. More names will be added as I reestablish contact with those I’ve fallen out of touch with.

This book would not have been possible without the help of so many wonderful people, but I’ll try my best to list those who played the most direct roles.

Beta Readers

I’d like to thank all my beta readers for reading this tale before it got good (or at least better ;) and for providing such wonderful suggestions along the way.

First and foremost, I’d like to thank my aunt (and fellow author), Kathleen Palm, for taking the time to read through this lengthy story in its earliest days1 and for providing encouragement along the way.

I’d also like to thank the kind-hearted souls over at Reading Excuses on the 17th Shard for giving extensive feedback2 on my opening chapter twice. Specifically, I’d like to give a big thanks to N.L. Bates, William C. Tracy, and everyone else who pitched in.

Additionally, I’d like to give a special thanks to all my friends and family who were willing to go from, oh, you’re writing a book (great…) to actually taking a chance on it by throwing out the perfect, abstract ideal image in their heads and giving their two cents on how to make it better. So thank you, Tyler Barbeau, Joshua DeRousse, Nathan DeRousse3, Gloria Guo-Quinn4, Anson Reynolds, and Alex Willeford.

Editing

Special thanks to my cousin, Nathan Quinn, for reaching out to everyone to help me find an editor and for referring me to Erik Maloney—to whom I cannot express enough gratitude. Nonetheless, thank you, Erik, for soldiering through countless spelling and grammar mistakes and culling excess italics and contractions so that others didn’t have to!

Last Minute Sanity Checkers

I’d also like to thank everyone who volunteered and was able to help check for random spaces and other errors that Google Docs introduced5 before this book got uploaded. Specifically, I’d like to thank my brother, Adam B. H. Quinn, for being a hero and speedreading the entirety of the novel over the course of an afternoon!

Subject Matter Experts

Last, and certainly not least, I’d like to thank those who provided feedback in domains outside my expertise:

  • Brian Magee, thank you for doing your best to answer truly absurd chemistry questions6.
  • Jason Palm, thanks for providing guidance on ambiguous, hypothetical legal charges.
  • Alex Willeford, thanks for weighing in on unlikely fight scene specifics in the pursuit of realism.

Bonus: Celebrity Thank Yous

Note: I have unfortunately never met the following authors, but without their work, this book would have never come to be.

  • Malcolm Gladwell, thank you for publishing Outliers. I’ve enjoyed every book you’ve written, but without Outliers, I doubt that I would have ever gotten into reading non-fiction, nor would I have ever thought that I had a chance to publish a book my own one day7.
  • Brandon Sanderson, thank you for publishing such wonderful stories and putting your Creative Writing lectures online for free. Without those resources, I sincerely doubt this book would have been as good as it has become.
  • Neil Gaiman, as with the others, I found your wit and wisdom invaluable throughout this process. And while I cannot draw as straight a line from your tales to my work, I am confident that my subconscious was particularly influenced by American Gods, Norse Mythology, and your genie story (i.e., October in A Calendar of Tales).

P.S. And thank you to everyone who has read this tale and felt the need to review it or unobnoxiously tell a friend. Such actions may be small, their impact on the success of this work cannot be understated.

Footnotes

  1. And for providing feedback on the very first unpublished story I wrote (which is still in desperate need of an overhaul). ↩

  2. And for teaching me to do the same! ↩

  3. To whom also belongs the esteemed honor of persevering through the same unpublished work as my aunt. ↩

  4. Thank you for your patience and for allowing me to take the time I needed to complete this manuscript. ↩

  5. To those considering using Google Docs’ export to epub feature, don’t. Every single comment and suggestion adds a space between letters wherever the original edit was made (e.g., if your editor fixed your spelling of “guerrilla”, then docs might export it as “gue r rilla”). ↩

  6. Such as, would it be realistically possible to melt chips of lead paint on a stove? And if so, would the various substances therein separate into layers? ↩

  7. To oversimplify things, by reading Outliers (and in particular, listening to the interview at the end of the Audiobook—as that helped crystalize my thoughts), I came to believe that success can roughly be summed up as a combination of circumstance and perseverance (i.e., extended periods of hard work). Without the former, things may never take off into the stratosphere, but without the latter, things will never get off the ground, no matter how many opportunities are squandered. ↩