ANNOUNCEMENT AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My newest novel, entitled Pierce, is available for purchase today, right now, at Farthest Heaven.

The book is, broadly speaking, about fathers and sons, marriage, heroism as reconciliation, and romance. Love, war, carpentry. Struggle.

It is very different than Fedbook. People who loved Fedbook will love this one. People who did not like Fedbook will probably also love it. I am very proud of the work, and I am excited and relieved to let it go.

This novel would not have existed without the help of many. The sum of my experience flows from my fingertips in a sort of degraded way. Patient, long-suffering “beta” readers helped me shape this novel into something worthwhile.

Outside of my experience, the words I set down on paper came from nowhere except study and my imagination. The book required the help and expertise of professionals to inlay the words with something resembling fidelity. I am blessed to have been helped with this as well, by people far more knowledgeable than me.

First and foremost, I must thank my wife, who has endured my solitary habit with far more grace than I deserve, and served as a first-rate test reader for the earliest versions of the manuscript. I thank my mother, for being the first to call me “writer.” I thank my dad, for his sterling example of fatherhood, the foil against which I judge myself and which the characters in this novel are judged by me. You taught me everything worth learning.

I must also thank Marty Phillips, Jonathan Eichin, and Isaac Armstrong for reading versions of this book which were not quite fit to print, and for their helpful suggestions, which were implemented before Mr. Ballard ever got ahold of it.

I thank Karsten Van Dycken and Benn Koljonnen for teaching me as much as I ever wanted to learn about carpentry, and then some. I thank Paul McNeil for hosting me in Wyoming, where the first words of this manuscript were written. I thank Andy Edwards for accepting my offer to send him Fedbook, and encouraging me as a writer thereafter. Thank you to Cap and Ty Cheves-Matthews for putting me in touch with Will Ballard, who I thank from the bottom of my heart for taking a chance on the book (and putting up with something north of 1,200 line edits).

And finally, I have to thank my friends who are veterans and/or currently serve in the Marine Corps, who lent me much needed expertise on the contents of Part 2. I thank John King Spiezio, Tom Edgemon, and Mishima Head for graciously working through that section with me, correcting me where I was completely wrong, and offering their encouragement. Your help was invaluable.

On a related note, I feel I must thank 3^rd Battalion, 5^th Marines, Kilo Company, whose movements in that fateful city I studied intensely and from whose acts of valor I drew inspiration for the events in the novel. I was never there. I never could have been there. I looked at the landscape of GWOT fiction and found it lacking, despite the obvious wellspring. There is a line between hubris and good faith; only they can judge whether I crossed it. I hope I didn’t.

Truly, really, totally, sincerely,

John Jay Stancliff

BUY Pierce TODAY!