Inspection

Acknowledgments

I met the editor of this book for the first time in person at a bar. It was fitting for a number of reasons. For starters, the setting was loose. The music was loud. We were surrounded by book people: writers and agents, editors and more. And just before signing with Del Rey, I’d confided in a friend that the feeling I was looking for in a publishing house was the metaphorical equivalent of an intellectual clubhouse. That I could almost hear, in the distance, the group of people I ought to be working with, as they caroused in a wooden pub, as someone played a live, and sloppy, guitar, as the conversation rose and ebbed on the waves of electric art. It wasn’t until I was actually standing beside Tricia Narwani, discussing (at the time) Unbury Carol and New York City’s Lower East Side, that I realized I’d signed with the editor of my imaginings, a woman whom I could not only talk shop with, but talk anything, truly, at all. Carol was an incredible experience, but the process was surely intensified with Inspection. Tricia’s notes weren’t simply good ideas. They were (and are) observations that encouraged me to give the book another round, and another, to reach for a higher level of performance. All while retaining the joy of the impetus it took to begin with.

Tricia, thank you so.

And Allison…

A quick story here: I was a week out from wrapping the rewrite of Inspection. I got up from my desk with a mind to take our dog, Valo, for a walk. As I was latching the leash to her collar, Allison, from the couch, asked if I’d considered a certain something happening in the book and didn’t I think the book would be better if I did? I brushed the suggestion off, told her it was a good idea but it was also a 150-page idea, and, you know, darling, I’m a week away from finishing this thing. I took Valo outside and made it half a block before I stopped. Valo tugged but I didn’t give because I realized then that I couldn’t turn my back on the idea that was just presented to me. I rushed back inside, told Allison she was a genius (a cruel one at that; the work I had to do!) and phoned my manager, Ryan Lewis, to tell him her idea. He said the same thing I’d thought outside. You gotta do it. And so I did, and so Inspection became richer in a way that almost frightens me now, when I consider what the book was close to being if Allison hadn’t said a word.

Allison, thank you.

And thank you to Kristin Nelson, my superagent, who had a feeling Del Rey would be a good home for me. Kristin’s “feelings” are closer to psychic phenomena, as her instincts are the stuff of legend.

Thanks to Wayne Alexander, who read Inspection’s rough draft. I can’t imagine a more fascinating lawyer than Wayne, nor one so full of stories of his own.

Thank you to my bandmates in the High Strung who listened to me go on about a megalomaniac who believed genius was distracted by the opposite sex. I can guess how weird this one sounded in its earliest stages.

Matt Sekedat, thank you.

David Moench, Mary Moates, Julie Leung, and the rest of the Del Rey crew, thank you. You make the business of publishing books look as exciting as the act of writing them.

Dave Stevenson, thank you for a cover that made me leap from my office chair.

Kathy Lord, you’re the copy editor I wish was there in my office every time I sit down to write. Your assistance with the timeline and so many other things…thank you.

My mom, Debbie Sullivan, and her husband, Dave, thank you for reading the books when they were just printouts, unindented and all.

Candace Lake, thank you so.

And Ryan Lewis: when I tell people my manager is one of my best friends, they justifiably guess Ryan and I had been friends before my books started getting published. But that wasn’t the case. While working together—under what sometimes has felt like arctic-expedition conditions—Ryan and I have reached that spot where we’ve extracted bona fide friendship from a notoriously intense dynamic: the artist and manager. It’s like we’ve traveled two arcs, concurrently, one of work, one of play.

We’re still traveling them now.

And Dave Simmer, always and ever, thank you for getting this engine started to begin with.