Acknowledgments
Captain Freedom Acknowledgments
I never formally acknowledged any non-fictional persons in the text of Captain Freedom, and it’s because the publisher offered me a lifetime supply of Tom’s of Maine Organic Anchovy and Chive Toothpaste if I omitted it. But they’ll never track down my crafty web acknowledgments.
I’d like to thank my earliest readers: my wife Elizabeth, who did me the courtesy of laughing out loud more than once and helped me find space for my ever-expanding collection of comic books and graphic novels, not to mention constant love and support in the face of daunting rejections, and keeping me in fancy quills while she goes out to work every damn day; Dana Foley, a tireless cheerleader and excellent wordsmith; my great friend, band-mate and fellow humorist Gladstone, who wrote critical notes, suggested a much better last name for Our Hero’s alter ego, reminded me that I’d accidentally stolen a Simpson’s joke and forced me to look up pathos in the dictionary. Apparently it’s a common synonym for “dickweed.”
To the true believers: Helen Zimmermann, my agent, and Carl Lennertz, my editor-champion at Harper Collins, who guided me through the process of moving the ms from a double-spaced, Times New Roman doc with padded margins to an actual book. They both worked incredibly hard to make Freedom a better novel. Thank you for your suggestions, demands and occasional gentle shoves. Carl: Nair is inherently funny.
And to everyone else without whom this page would not resemble an Oscar Acceptance Speech:
Mom, Nancy, John, all the Knisels, Kolbs and Michaelsons, Matt Dundas, Matt Herlihy, John Warner, David Biespiel, the boys of Yankee Pot Roast, McSweeneys, everyone at LiveWire! in Stumptown Oregon, all the great folks at Harper Perennial, HumorFeed, Matt Tobey, Christopher Monks, Dennis DeClaudio, Neal Pollack and Christopher Moore. A special and significant thank you to Brian McAuliffe, my tenth grade English teacher who first exposed me to creative writing and didn’t openly mock me for writing short stories with superheroes.
And then, of course, a nod to the free and open source software community, to whom I’ve owed a huge debt for advancing both my professional and creative life: Ubuntu, Fedora, and Red Hat Linuxes, PHP, PostGres, Mapserver, MySQL, Apache, OpenOffice, WordPress, the GIMP, and Wikipedia, without which I may never have learned the correct usage of “ret-conned.”
G. Xavier Robillard
Boston Massachusetts
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