Acknowledgements

It takes a great deal of talent and effort to pull together something like this.

Janice Carello led the project, received and acknowledged the manuscripts, massaged the files to make them anonymous for our committee of readers, and coordinated the selection process.

Alicia Henn, Craig DeLancey, Steve Carper, Ruhan Zhao, Tom Whittemore, Ben Chapman, Lyndsay Calusine, Eric Scoles (me), and Kim Gillett (most often our gracious host) met regularly to brainstorm, argue, and plan. 

Kim Gillett, Craig DeLancey, Tom Whittemore, Ben Chapman and Alicia Henn each read and ranked every story, other than their own, without knowing the identity of the author. As judges, they were restricted from voting for their own stories, but (along with Janice) worked together to arrive at the final manuscript selection.

Once the winning stories were selected, Janice created a pasteup (a rough advance copy used for pre-layout proofing) that was sent to Jack Garner, who had agreed to write an introduction. We'd like to thank Jack both for the introduction and for taking the time to read that first version. We'd also like to thank Jonathan Sherwood for his accompanying foreword, his work on the marketing committee, and for founding r-spec in the first place.

Thanks as well to Paula Marchese and Sheryl de Jonge-Loavenbruck for proofing the pasteup, to David Henn for his generous help with the final text edits, and to David Pascal for the book's cover and page design. 

And finally, we would like to thank the most important contributors to this book -- the writers themselves. 

June 2009
Eric Scoles
R-SPEC CTO