Above (30 page)

It’s a bit of a stereotype to say that the work and care of a lot of people go into making a first novel. It’s also true in ways that I never realized until I tried to make one myself, and found out exactly why all those other novel acknowledgment pages sound like they do: So many pairs of hands go into making a first novelist that it’s impossible to count them all, and deeply humbling to try. Here are a few.

Thanks to Elizabeth Bear, Liz Bourke, Amanda Downum, Cathy Freeze, Kelly Jones, Jaime Lee Moyer, David Nickle, Michelle Sagara, Marsha Sisolak, Karina Sumner-Smith, Chris Szego, and Sarah Trick, who all read drafts or chapters or snippets and told me what sang right and what didn’t make sense. Chris Coen, Jodi Meadows, and Sarah Prineas graciously looked over supporting materials, the query and synopsis, and were incredibly generous with their thoughts, tips, suggestions, and confidence. They are all the sharpest readers a person could ask for.

Thanks to everyone on the Online Writing Workshop for Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror for providing nine years of friendship, learning, recipes, silliness, and ripping each other’s work to pieces to find out how it ticks.

Thanks to everyone at Bakka-Phoenix Books for four years that weren’t just gainful employment, but one of the best educations in publishing around.

Thanks to Michael Cook of Vanishing Point and Agatha Barc of The Former Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital Project/Asylum By the Lake for the reference photos that helped build Safe and my (heavily fictionalized) Lakeshore Psychiatric. I am bad at sneaking into storm drains and former asylums, and worse at photography, and the work they do to document Toronto’s geographic and social history is invaluable.

Thanks to kaigou, for the Livejournal post on what it’s really like to live on the street as a teen and how fiction gets that wrong, which helped create Beatrice and her little world.

Thanks to Eli Clare and his book
Exile and Pride
for the image that sent me rushing to the keyboard, and to Cherie Dimaline and her book
Red Rooms
for the perspective on being a First Nations person in the city.

Thanks to the Toronto Arts Council, whose writers’ grant both kept a roof over my head for two rounds of revisions and gave me the confidence to not give up or settle for good enough, but to do the job right.

Thanks to my agent, Caitlin Blasdell, for her sharp editorial eye, terrifying confidence in both the manuscript and me, and unerring sense of where this book belonged.

Thanks to my editor, Cheryl Klein, for just generally being the smartest, for the rigor and care and excitement she put into every line of this thing, and for not just liking this book but
getting
it, really and truly.

And finally, to my parents, Esther and Nigel Bobet, for the steady supply of both novels and blank notebooks while I was growing up, and for telling me I could do anything I put my mind to when I was young enough to believe it wholeheartedly. I’m sorry I kept stealing your books. Here’s one back.

Leah Bobet lives in a hundred-year-old house in Toronto, plants gardens in alleyways, and wears feathers in her hair. This is her first novel. Please visit her website at www.leahbobet.com.