Candles Burning

Acknowledgments

This novel is a collaboration. Michael McDowell began it a decade ago. He died before he could finish it. His editor, Susan Allison, approached me through my agent, Ralph Vicinanza, with the idea of completing it. I was immediately intrigued. The manuscript and the notes that Michael left were incomplete, but he had carried the story forward several hundred pages. The story as I completed it is not the story that Michael set out to tell, or the one that he would have told, had he lived to finish it. Every novelist knows the difference. This is the story that I drew from Michael’s manuscript.

I hope that it would have pleased and amused him, and that it pleases Laurence Senelick, Michael’s longtime companion, and Michael’s sister, Ann, and brother, James, who survive him. Laurence has given me generous support and approval for this project and provided notes and fragments of the original manuscript that had gone astray. He has my deep gratitude.

Thanks to Julie Ann Eugley, Marsha DeFillippo, Barbara Ann McIntyre, Margaret Morehouse, Marcella Spruce, and Diane Ackerly, providers of logistical support, research, scheduling, and lunches; to Dave Higgins, who maintains our Macs. As always, to my first readers, Nora K., Kelly B., Owen, Joey, Steve, Sarah Jane, M., my oldest sister, and M., my youngest sister. Thanks to my family also, for the humor with which they have tolerated my antisocial prickliness when I am working. Thanks to Douglas Winter, who knows for what, and shrieks to Lyn.

Thanks to Ralph and to Susan.

But most of all, thank you, Michael. It was fun. And I miss you.