In Dedication – Book 1

Why do people dedicate books? Who do they dedicate them to and why? Too often these questions go unanswered, the reason for the author’s dedication remaining forever obscured. And granted, most people don’t really care.

Most of my friends and test readers have no idea who the dedicatees of my Supervillain series are. I noticed this sort of mysterious fog effect going on, but they’re all extremely important people to me and… there’s a method to my madness!

With the exception of Book Six everyone the series is dedicated to has been a hero to me in some way. And to honor this fact you must sit through a blog post about each and every one of them!

The dedication to my first book reads:

To Rick
Because you believed in me
Because you were my hero

So who is Rick? Rick is a phenomenal actor I met in 2008 during a production of Annie. He played the part of Daddy Warbucks. I was a chorus member. However, I was also a musician/singer which Rick was not. He had a fine singing voice, but he was seemingly overwhelmed by the complexity of his part. He readily accepted my offer to help him, and over the next three months we became close friends.

Despite being one of a cast of forty people I didn’t make many friends during that production. And it’s entirely possible I made some enemies. It was my first play, and I had my first crush, and I was finishing my first novel.  I was eighteen, was finishing my final year of highschool, and was being generally traumatized by the real world.

Probably the main reason I didn’t end up hating Annie was because of Rick. He was my friend and champion. He believed in me. He told me I could succeed. He told me I was amazing. He read Prince of Yen in all it’s unfinished glory and liked it. He protected and defended me, but he never treated me like a child.

And then the play was over, and we went our separate ways. But we kept in touch through email and, since we’ve yet to be in the same production again, we started going to each other’s plays. If Rick was in a play I was bound to be there. And I always invited him to mine.

And then something truly horrible happened to me. In November of 2009, a year and a half after I had met Rick, I got an email from him letting me know that the very next day he was going into surgery to have a brain tumor removed, and that there was a fifty percent chance that he would die.

I’ll save you the terrible suspense I went through over the next few days and let you know the ending straight off – the surgery went well. Nobody died of suspense or otherwise. And when I made my directorial debut in February 2010 with the Greek tragedy Antigone, Rick was there.

Our lives are shaped by the people that are in them. The people who tell us we’re failures and the people who tell us we’re amazing play an equal part in our triumphs in life. The people who judge our work impact our decision to continue to create or not. And one person encouraging, uplifting and defending can outweigh a whole host of nay-sayers.