Liquid Fire (62 page)
Authors: Anthony Francis
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About Anthony Francis
LIQUID FIRE had an unusually long gestation—I started five novels and finished two of them between the time I started it in April of 2008 and the time I sent version 121 to Debra Dixon at Bell Bridge Books in February of 2015.
In that time, I had awesome support from my friends. Many of the crew at the Write to the End writer’s group either beta read or helped me work through problems, including Gayle, David, Liza, Betsy, Keiko, Nathan, Ruth, and several others.
My family and friends also helped as well, including my wife Sandi, my mother-in-law Barb, many of my friends in the Edge, including Gordon and Jim, and many of my friends in the Dragon Writers Group back in Atlanta. Thanks to you all.
I also had great research assistance. Keiko O’Leary’s linguistic analysis was invaluable to me in keeping Cinnamon sounding like Cinnamon. John Kim, Prosecutor of the County of Maui, helped me understand jurisdictional issues.
Thanks go out to my friends in the Georgia Tech Taido Club, and special thanks to Andy Fossett, a 5th degree black belt who reviewed the Taido scenes in this book. Any Taido mistakes are mine. Any Taido misspellings are Dakota’s.
Thanks also to The Crucible of Oakland for providing both wonderful performances and a great space for learning the fire arts, and to Lara Hopwood, the instructor at the Crucible who taught my wife and me to spin fire.
The first major chunk of LIQUID FIRE was written in National Novel Writing Month of 2008, and thanks go to Chris Baty (for creating Nano), Grant Faulkner (for running it), and Ann Arbor (for letting me read clips of LIQUID FIRE on KFJC).
Of the many, many books I read for research, Helen Gaines’s CRYPTANALYSIS and Martin Gardner’s CODES, CIPHERS AND SECRET WRITING are called out in the text; I also recommend MAUI by Jan TenBruggencate and Douglas Peebles.
LIQUID FIRE is set in the world next door, so thanks to the familiar haunts of Atlanta and to the new haunts of the Bay Area, especially San Francisco’s Union Square, Stanford’s Bookstore, Palo Alto’s Nola, and the much missed Asia de Cuba and Borders. Also thanks to Maui . . . for letting me blow it up. Sorry about the park.
Thanks again to my editor at Bell Bridge, Debra Dixon, who helped me hammer on LIQUID FIRE until it was shorter, tighter and punchier than BLOOD ROCK until, in short, we were both satisfied that you’d be satisfied with it.
Finally, I want to thank you, my readers, for making FROST MOON and BLOOD ROCK a success. I hope you enjoy the continuing adventures of Dakota Frost in LIQUID FIRE.
—the Centaur, February 17, 2015
P.S. Thanks, Big G. You know who you are.
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About Anthony Francis
By day, Dr. Anthony G. Francis, Jr. builds intelligent machines and emotional robots; by night, he writes science fiction and draws comic books. He received his PhD from Georgia Tech in 2000 for a thesis applying human memory principles to information retrieval; since then, he’s worked on 3D object visualization, search engines, robot pets, military software, police software, and software for the CDC. He cannot confirm or deny that he is currently working on robotics at Google.
Anthony loves exploring the collision of fantasy with reality; in the Skindancer series, he explores what Atlanta, Georgia and the San Francisco Bay Area would be like if populated with vampires, werewolves, wizards, and fae. Anthony spent almost two decades in Atlanta before he and his wife were lured out to San Jose by the Search Engine That Starts With A G. Like Dakota, Anthony dropped out of college chemistry, loves math, and is a brown belt in Taido, but unlike Dakota, he doesn’t have a single tattoo.
LIQUID FIRE is the third in the Skindancer urban fantasy series, following FROST MOON and BLOOD ROCK, and Anthony has plans for many more. You can visit Anthony on the web at dresan.com, or learn more about the world of Dakota Frost at dakotafrost.com, or on her Facebook page facebook.com/dakotafrost.
