To all the writers who came before me and created the stories that were my building blocks, the books that held me together and made me strive to do better. A fond and grateful toast to the memories of Terry Pratchett, Diana Wynne Jones, Georgette Heyer, Joan Aiken, P. G. Wodehouse, Dorothy Dunnett, and Dorothy L. Sayers. And to my contemporaries in SFF, who are making the genre wider and deeper and richer and weirder and queerer: I’m thrilled and honoured to be working at the same time as you, in the same spaces as you.
