Acknowledgements,
or Thanks for Righting
  

My parents always were wonderfully encouraging and helpful — and in a vitally important sense still are, although they no longer are present to read and discuss what I'm doing. They were aware that writing requires literacy, inspiration, and work; and that any success likely includes luck as well. In my essay Pilots' Proverbs: Parental Wisdom Brought Down to Earth , I summarize some of their general wisdom from a lofty yet entirely practical perspective. The ascents and flights and descents and perhaps even loops and barrel-rolls of serious writing may benefit by keeping these proverbs in mind.

Novel-writing is necessarily a rather solitary activity, and even collaborators who generally do their brainstorming and perhaps some revising together, must each write their portions of the original draft by themselves. Whoever's name is on the byline bears final responsibility for the work, even if it has been mangled by censors (for instance, Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus) or improved by the style-deaf (more victims than you might suspect). While it's only a casual analogy, the pilot has to take his plane aloft and take the risks in the open air; having a caring and thoughtful ground crew (as for instance the US Army Air Corps men in the above early World War II postcard) ensuring that all components are rightly tuned may make all the difference at the far end of the runway when the wheels go up.

I list below some people who helped significantly with my writing at various stages, and add these public thanks to my private ones.
  

• Way back when, and ever since and onwards, my parents
• Wilfred R. Franson
• Vera Howe Franson
    
• As a real-life exemplar, a writer of science fiction short stories, my uncle
• Donald L. Franson
    
• When trying with youthful seriousness, but without gaining traction
• Wilfred R. Franson
• Vera Howe Franson
• Dean M. Sandin
• Robert Enstrom
    
• The Shadow of the Ship, 1976 novella & 1983 novel
• Wilfred R. Franson
• Vera Howe Franson
• Robert Enstrom
    
• The editor who wanted a change in the narrative point of view of the 1983 novel
• Judy-Lynn del Rey
    
• The Shadow of the Ship, Revised Edition, 2014
• Robert Enstrom
• David H. Franson
• Jennifer Monroe Franson
• Carol Kalescky
• William H. Stoddard
• Charles L. Weatherford
    
• Sphinx Daybreak
• Robert Enstrom
• David H. Franson
• Jennifer Monroe Franson
• Daniel Ludwig
• Dean M. Sandin
• William H. Stoddard
• Charles L. Weatherford
    
• Interlinearly, some novelists who gave me timely encouragement & advice on specific aspects of novel-writing
• Louis L'Amour
• Ann Maxwell
• David Brin
    

Thank you, as always.

  
© 2015, 2018 Robert Wilfred Franson

  
Material by or about most of the above
can be found at
Troynovant
  

  
Disclaimers and Dedications
enter as a small Prologue, disarmingly