I’ve always been a rather solitary person and thought writing would be no different. I couldn’t have been more wrong. To my very first writer friend, Kapri Psych, thank you for the hours of FaceTime chats and long voice notes about our stories and fur babies and hopes and dreams. One of these days we’ll stop apologizing to each other when it takes us a while to reply.
To Adrian Graves, hype woman extraordinaire, thank you for coming into my life and letting me scream at you every step of the way. And for introducing me to Ratatouille.
To the beta readers who suffered through early drafts of Curious Tides and provided such thoughtful feedback; to those who read the first chapter so long ago and hyped it up when I needed it most; to everyone who let me pester them with questions about querying and other publishing matters; and to all the amazing, encouraging writer friends I’ve met along the way—thank you, thank you, THANK YOU. I could not have done this without all of you. To name but a few: Jen Carnelian, Kamilah Cole, Miriam Cortinovis, Lilian Lai, Chelsea Abdullah, Kiana Krystle, Bailey Knaub, Jenny Marie, Trang Thanh Tran, Emma Theriault for the coffee dates, SJ Donders and Suzey Ingold for that cozy writing retreat （I’m so glad Adrian brought us together）。
And to the artists who helped me bring the characters in my mind to life when I was still struggling to visualize them: Amanda S. Dumky, Georgina Donnelly, @stellesappho, you are all so talented—and to Marcella （@mariamarcelw）， who went above and beyond.
Thank you, of course, to the people in my life who have had to listen to me talk about this book for so long now and who have never doubted I could do this （as far as I know—otherwise thank you for pretending）。 To Crystal Lanois for the constant laughs over all our years of friendship （cue “Hold On” by Wilson Phillips）。 To Mylène Lavallée for your unwavering enthusiasm. Don’t worry, you don’t have to read this—your support is more than enough. To Valérie Patry for our many connard-connasse-douchebag outings to Chapters, the movies, ComicCon, etcetera—our friendship has fueled my creativity and love of stories in more ways than you know. To Gabriel Landry for the late-night wine talks about all the books and shows we love, and for encouraging me every time I poked my head out of the office/writing cave.
And to Marie-ève Landry: we’ve been called twins our whole lives, and while we may have never seen it ourselves, I’ve always thought there was some glimmer of truth there. You’re my soul twin. Thanks for thirty years of friendship and counting—and for being a fan since Les Dix Royaumes.
Mom and Dad, you believed in me back when I was a teen with big dreams who could never put her books down, who monopolized the family computer to write, who printed out pages and pages of publishing info and said, “This is what I want to do.” Thanks for still believing in me years later when I picked up the pieces of that discarded dream, and above all, for letting me crash at your place, feeding me, and keeping Roscoe entertained while I scrambled to meet deadlines; it made all the difference in the world. And éric, thanks for cheering me on from across the country. Love you all.
A big thanks to all the teachers I’ve had who were so encouraging about my writing. Et surtout, à No?lla Lacelle: J’ai écrit ce livre en anglais, mais sache que ce sont tes cours de fran?ais—et toi—qui ont inspiré en moi cette passion pour l’écriture, ce désir d’explorer des mondes nouveaux, ce rêve de devenir auteure. Merci.
And finally, to you, reader: thank you for picking this book up. I hope it can be for you its own kind of portal on a page.