Acknowledgments
With heartfelt gratitude, I thank Mr. D.B.
Bennett for his artwork on this book’s title page and for his artwork on map
one’s upper left quadrant. Doug is a lifelong artist whom I have known since
early childhood. I would also like to thank Mr. Mark Lysaught, a retired
cartographer who advised me on my maps. Mark is a dear friend from boyhood, the
best man at my wedding, and worthy of mention; he made the maps in my
non-fiction book, American Errand, Rivers of the North.
With regard to editing: Although my
creative work, including the structuring of text, is not AI-assisted, I would
like to thank Grammarly and their AI for
helping me check for typos and make minor grammatical corrections in the final
edit.
I would like to thank Google, their
search engine, and their Gemini AI for helping me tremendously with my
research. I’m old enough to remember going to the library and checking out
armloads of books. Also, I would like to thank Google for providing Blogger, a free and user-friendly website service. It is no small thing, and I greatly appreciate it.
I would like to thank HP, Flux.1 AI, Canva Draw, and MS Paint for their help in creating the artwork on this book’s jacket. By running Flux.1 AI on my somewhat standard HP VSD9VLCR laptop, I was able to get a rudimentary foundation to work from, which I extensively altered using Canva Draw and MS Paint. I am not an artist, but fortunately, using the tools above, I was able to create a book jacket that I could accept.
I
would like to thank Canva Pro for the human images on the back cover. I input
snippets from this book into their 'Dream Lab' AI image generator, and on its
first try, the AI produced the images as shown. I would also like to thank Cava
Pro and MS Paint for helping me create the compass roses on maps one and two.
