Mayan December (33 page)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wrote this book because I have been to Palenque once and I have been to the Riviera Maya twice. I’ve sat at the top of the Temple of K’uk’ulkan at Chichén Itzá and climbed crumbling half-restored steps at Coba to look out over jungle canopy far below me. I have been swimming at the beach in Xcaret and Akumal. I love the land and the people there, and the mystery of their past seemed worth exploring.

Many thanks to the Mayanists of our time: the people who study the historical Mayan culture. I read widely in preparation for writing this book, starting with Diego de Landa’s
Yucatan before and after the conquest
” which was written in 1566, and through many far more modern works by Linda Schele, David Friedel, Joy Parker, Anthony F. Aveni and John Major Jenkins (a full bibliography can be found at www.mayandecember.com). I read work by academics and spiritualists, and by optimists and doomsayers. Nothing that I read had the same thing to say about either the Mayan culture or its relationship to our own modern world. Perhaps that’s as it should be; the ancient Mayans probably could not have imagined the modern world any more than we can truly see and understand their world.

But it was sure fun to try!

Note that this is a work of fiction: while well researched, there are bits of the world I portray here that are simply made up. That’s what fiction writers get to do.

Thanks to my immediate family Toni and Katie Cramer, and to my mom and dad for reading and commenting, as well as to a host of other first readers like John Pitts, Darragh Metzger, Cat Rambo, Louise Marley, and others. Every writer needs good feedback to make a book better.

Thanks to Sean Wallace at Prime Books for believing in this book. Thanks to Paula Guran for the many fine comments and corrections that helped make this better. And as always, thanks to my agent, Eleanor Wood.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Brenda Cooper
has published fiction in
Analog, Oceans of the Mind, Nature
, and in multiple anthologies. She is the author of the Endeavor award winner for 2008:
The Silver Ship and the Sea,
and of the sequels,
Reading the Wind
and
Wings of Creation
. By day, she is the City of Kirkland’s CIO, and at night and in early morning hours, she’s a futurist and writer.

OTHER BOOKS BY BRENDA COOPER

Building Harlequin’s Moon,
with Larry Niven

The Silver Ship and the Sea

Reading the Wind

Wings of Creation