In the midst of a hectic day preparing for Thanksgiving with friends and family, I want to pause and express my love and gratitude to:

1) READERS: I almost wrote “my readers”, and while I do love y’all especially, in reality I’m just grateful for all readers, every last person out there who enjoys picking up a book and immersing themselves in a tale spun by one of us wacky writers. Thank you for going on the journeys with our characters, for falling in love alongside them, for crying with them, for helping them live outside of the writer’s mind. Thank you, also, for trusting us with your hard-earned money, for trusting that the trip will be worth it, so that we can afford to write more stories for you. Thank you, readers! You make our hearts sing and make our work worthwhile.

2) Beta-readers: These special first readers get extra buckets of gratitude for making sure we don’t embarrass ourselves too badly, for telling us the ugly truths about our babies (books) and forcing us to reevaluate them with new eyes. Thank you for taking precious time away from your family, friends, work, job, and life to read our books (sometimes more than once) with a critical eye and then writing out (sometimes long) emails about how they can be better. Thank you for fighting for our books. You’re our heroes.

3) Editors: Thank you for trying to fix every last wrong thing in our books and for making our books your own babies, too. Thank you for forcing us into the harder edits that we might otherwise resist. We’d be a mess without you!

4) Reviewers: Thank you for loving books so much you tell the world about them! Thank you for doing your best to spread the word about the books you love and for being honest about the books you don’t. Thank you for spending time away from your family, friends, and life to run blogs, promote our books, post on Goodreads/FB/Twitter with so much enthusiasm. Where would we be with you guys? You do so much for all of us authors! Thank you forever!

5) Family and Friends: Thank you for listening to us talk endlessly about made up people. Thank you for giving us the time to write the books, for not making us feel guilty about how often we spend our free hours in a fantasy land, and thank you for understanding piled up dishes, and laundry, and missed appointments. Thank you for holding our hands when books bomb, and for jumping up and down with us when books do well, and for reading books that you might otherwise not just because we wrote them. Thank you for your love, your support, your cheerleading, and your tether to reality.

Thank you! You make our world go ’round!