WALTZ AGAINST THE SKY
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
No list of acknowledgments could possibly be complete, unless it also included all those people who have been kind enough to encourage me to keep writing stories. And that list would be lengthy.
However, I do want to thank the first readers of various versions of Waltz Against the Sky:
My wife, muse and reader, Pat Larum, and step-daughter Raven Salvato;
Ned & Esther’s boy, Dr. Tim Pilgrim, professor emeritus at Western Washington University and one of the Pacific Northwest’s great poetic voices, and his journalist/professor wife, Carolyn Dale;
my sister Nancy Larum, who has been in my corner all her life;
brothers-in-law Don and Joe Taylor and their wives, Dian and Nancy;
my old friend Simon Franco and his clan, which includes grown children Jason, Becca and Brett, all of whom read a version;
Jim Lutz, formidable cribbage adversary and enthusiastic reader;
next-door neighbor John ‘Artly’ Fox, who also shared his own unpublished (and probably better) manuscript;
granddaughter Jenna Rountree Lewis, who took a copy with her (and read it) on her Caribbean honeymoon;
niece Lourdes Lee Taylor, who read it while she was visiting the region in which the story unfolded;
an old college pal, Wayne Meuchel, who has spent a lifetime haunting bookstores and never met a book he didn’t like (including this one);
and friend Charlotte Slack, also a writer, who was the first to see a finished print copy and warmed my heart by declaring (in what was its ‘initial review’ ), ‘It is terrific.’ I know her just well enough to believe it.
I appreciate all of their comments, various editorial suggestions, and am grateful to them for pointing out errors of various kinds in the early versions –I take full responsibility for any that remain.