The second, and more important, is that it was far more fun to write his speech as President of the United States instead of President of the Confederacy because fuck those guys.
Original to this collection.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks first to you for reading this book all the way to here and still wanting more. That’s some persistence, and I admire it.
This book wouldn’t exist at all without the nudging of Steve Berman, CEO of Lethe Press, who reminds me that I actually do have a career even when I’d rather not think about it.
I’d also like to thank David Lally for providing the cover image for this book, perfectly capturing the feel I was going for. What most people don’t know is that he didn’t need to dress up at all to look like that. I’d also like to thank his wife Tina’s gams, also pictured on the cover.
Some of the earliest readers and hearers of these stories encouraged me to go on, and I’m grateful especially to Robert Stutts and Angela Still on that score. All the usual suspects (Tom Phillips, Don Rochester, Ray Rodil, Arnold Cassell, Kelley Vanda, Scott McClellan, Richard Soehner, Lillian Soehner, Mac McDonald, and William Simmons) heard several of these as a test audience, so they share the blame.
For perhaps the first time in my life, I work at a day job that actually contributes to my creativity and mental well-being instead of sapping it, and I’m grateful for the encouragement and/or bemused tolerance of Pete Martinez, Pamela Boggs, Todd Slifka, Derree Braswell, Dana Althoff, Heidi Burgess, Robert Weeks, Emily Heeren, Amy Schneider, Rich Thompson, and John Marshall.
I’m grateful that Sheila Williams at Asimov’s Science Fiction and John Joseph Adams at Nightmare Magazine saw the potential in some of these stories to publish them originally and offer editorial suggestions that made them way better.
My family, as always, has provided the rich water table of the bizarre which I continue to plumb, everyone from my sister Karen Simpson and her husband Marty to my nieces Katie and Emily and my brother Andrew.
I’ve already dedicated the book to my mother, but I wanted to say again how much I’ve appreciated her absolute, all-in belief that I should be doing this shit with my life. The cancer may have taken her body, but she’s left enough of her spirit in me to last many more years and many more stories.
And of course, Aimee Payne is the person with whom I’ve made just the life I need to make stories like these. She’s the reason I don’t have to choose between imagination and the real world anymore.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Will Ludwigsen’s fiction of “weird mystery” has appeared in places like The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, Weird Tales, Nightmare, Lightspeed, and many others.
He lives in Jacksonville, Florida, with his partner, writer Aimee Payne.
If you want to read more of the strange things he writes, you can find him on Twitter as @will_ludwigsen or on his own site, www.will-ludwigsen.com.
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