The Mirror of Worlds: Prologue

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

            Dan Breen continues as my first reader, catching the sort of grammatical errors which creep in when I'm writing fast or heavily editing chunks that just didn't come out right the first time. (Or the second time and third time, often enough. My roughs are often a mass of arrows, brackets, scribblings and overstrikes by the time they get to Dan.) He's also very good on size issues. As an aside, he was hugely amused when he saw that the counterpart in the Isles of Saxo Grammaticus was the Scribe of Breen.

            My webmaster, Karen Zimmerman, and Dorothy Day archived my texts in widely separated parts of the country. If an asteroid destroys the Triangle region of North Carolina, it will still be possible to reconstruct my drafts. (I won't be the person reconstructing them in that event, of course.)

            In addition, Dorothy acted as my continuity person (for example, "What the dickens was the name of the Minister of Supply?") and Karen provided research on all manner of questions that cropped up while I was writing (for example, "I need more information on the Great Tar Lake of Jamaica." Which, lest anyone be misled, turned out to be the Great Pitch Lake of Trinidad.) Their efforts made the book better and my life easier.

            It's traditional that each of my novels involves a computer problem. This time the power supply of my desktop unit (hooked up to my laser printer) went out as I started the first-pass edit. Mark L Van Name diagnosed the problem, my son Jonathan fixed it, and his facility manager Bill Catchings allowed Jonathan to borrow a power supply from stores to keep me operating until the new unit came in. This kind of skill and expertise is commercially available (from Mark, Jonathan, and Bill, among others), but I personally don't know enough about computers to have found it on my own.

            I dedicated this book to Miss Carter, my first Latin teacher (Junior and Senior years of high school). I wasn't particularly interested in languages at the time, and I certainly didn't apply myself in her classes. She was nonetheless a good enough teacher that she instilled a love for Latin which I wasn't aware of until I switched to German when I went off to college. I returned to Latin and haven't been very far from it since that day.

            I can scarcely overstate Latin's importance to my life generally and to the Isles series in particular. Without Miss Carter, I might be without the language and all the benefits it's brought me.

            This past summer has been difficult. My wife Jo has been enormously supportive throughout.

            Every time I create an acknowledgments page I'm reminded of how much my novels are collaborative projects, even though I'm doing all the writing myself. The book wouldn't be nearly as good without my family and friends. Losing a close friend, as I did this summer, drives home how very important my circle of family and friends is to my me generally.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

            I've based the religion of the Isles generally on that of Sumer: the sacred triad of Inanna, Dumuzi, and Ereshkigal. The words of power, however, are the voces mysticae of the documentary magic common in the Mediterranean Basin during classical times. This was the language spoken to the demiurges who would in turn intercede on behalf of humans with the Gods.

            I have no personal religious beliefs, but many very intelligent people believed that these voces mysticae were effective in rousing spiritual powers to affect human endeavors. I prefer not to pronounce them aloud. Readers can make their own decisions on the subject.

            As usual in the Isles series, the literary allusions in this novel are to classical and medieval writers of our own world. I won't bother to list the correspondences here, but the reader can rest assured that they exist.

            I'll mention one further point. I almost always have a photograph or a painting beside me while I work on a scene. That helps me give touches of reality to the fantasy worlds I'm creating. As one example among many, this time I used a copy of Les Tres Riches Heures of the Duke de Berry, an illuminated manuscript from around 1411 ad.

            Readers familiar with horses will know that sidesaddles now put the rider's legs to the left. If those persons will check August of Les Tres Riches Heures, they'll see that two of the three women riding have their legs to the right.

            While I do make mistakes, I suggest that this shouldn't be the first assumption readers make when they find something that surprises them.