Forests of the Heart

Author’s Note

Special thanks to Mary Ann for helping me find the time to write this through a couple of years that were inordinately busy; Charles Vess for providing me with some of the Green Man material (though I hasten to add that my take on that venerable figure is far different from the usual folkloric depictions); Miss Anna Sunshine Ison for los cadejos; Mardelle and Richard Kunz for putting up with far too many questions by e-mail—and for tracking down the answers to them; Jim Harris for the lexicon; Rodger Turner and Paul Fletcher for valiantly helping me through some rather severe computer woes (and thanks as well to Rodger for that early reading of the manuscript); Barry Ambridge for straightening me out on tires; Swain Wolfe for explaining the difference between power and luck; Lawrence Schmiel for vetting the Spanish (any errors are mine); Amanda Fisher for once again helping with the bookmarks; and the folks at Tor for being very patient this time.

I’ve been taken to task by a number of readers for not noting the music I was listening to when I’ve written my last few books. So, this time out my ears were filled, my toes tapped, my spirit was made more full by… well, too large a number of fine musicians to list them all here. But briefly, of late I’ve been listening to a lot of Steve Earle, Fred Eaglesmith, Dar Williams, Ani DiFranco, Stacey Earle, Buddy Miller, Tori Amos, the Walkabouts (including their “Chris and Carla” recordings), and all the various incarnations in which Johnette Napolitano finds herself, one of my favorites being the CD she recorded with Los Illegals.

When I’m actually writing, however, I lean more towards instrumental music where the words in my ear don’t interfere with the words going down on the screen. For this book that involved less Celtic music than usual, though Solas was never far from the CD player. Mostly I found myself playing some of those neo-Flamenco artists such as Robert Michaels, Ottmar Leibert, Ger-ardo Nunez, and Oscar Lopez, while towards the end of the book, Douglas Spotted Eagle’s Closer to Far Away and Robbie Robertson’s last two albums (Music for the Native Americans and Contact from the Underworld of Red-boy) were in constant rotation.

But man does not live by worldbeat alone. Many of the hours spent on this novel found me nodding my head to Art Tatum, Oscar Peterson, Miles Davis, Bill Evans, Charlie Haden’s duet albums, Clifford Brown, and this wonderful ten-CD set that my friend Rodger gave me: The Complete Jazz at the Philharmonic on Verve.

If you decide to try any of the above, I hope you’ll enjoy them as much as I have.

And as usual, let me mention that the city, characters, and events to be found in these pages are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

If any of you are on the Internet, come visit my homepage. The URL (address) is http://www.cyberus.ca/~cdl

—Charles de Lint, Ottawa, Spring 1999