endings (well, sort of) and author's notes
Usually dedications are pretty boring. For my wife Babs, who has put up with me all these years. For Mike. For Anil. Dedicated to the memory of my father. I like dedicating books to people close to me, and usually I'm just as boring as everybody else in the way I do it.
There's more latitude in what you can do when you write acknowledgments or notes. The standard, short form of this looks something like this:
I'd like to thank (insert one or more of the following: significant other, children, parents, teachers, editor) for their support; also, I am obligated to thank (insert names of persons who contributed factual knowledge or feedback) for their assistance, but of course any errors are my own; thanks also to (insert names of other writers who might have been helpful) for reading as I wrote and giving me feedback.To this laundry list you might add historical background on the story, the characters, or the setting; short anecdotes about how you came to write the darn novel in the first place; hints for people who want to pursue the subject matter further; some indication of the next novel you're working on, if it's related to the current one; explanations about language or naming issues. I've done all these things for one novel or another. Sometimes I've done all of them. I figure, if a given reader isn't interested, they'll skip it; if they want to know more about the early history of smallpox vaccines, they will plow ahead.
Then there are author biographies. These are almost always wrong in some way. The European editions of most of my books still declare me to be a professor, although I resigned my faculty position four years ago. I have tried in vain to get them to fix this. Some authors get carried away with their bios. One very successful author who shall remain nameless once managed to include photos of her family and her daughter's wedding reception, along with observations on how nicely her collection of antique linen looked on the tables. It felt more like an annual Christmas newsletter than an author's note, but hey. Obviously her editor thought it was a good idea, and who am I to argue. Maybe my readers would be interested in my father's recipe for braciole? I thought not.
Sometimes authors have fun with their bios and come to regret it, as Neal Stephenson did with Snow Crash. That bio was very funny, but apparently it has haunted him (and not in a good way) ever since. From his website:
Often there comes a certain giddiness when one has finished a book and learned that it is to be published. This is especially pronounced among young writers. Some time later, the publisher requests an author bio, acknowledgments, dedications, and other ancillary material. In my early books, I tended to use these as an opportunity to goof around and blow off steam. This was particularly true in author bios, which for some reason I find very difficult to take seriously. For example, at one point in my career I had seen a spate of author biographies that I found especially pompous, and so wrote a mock-pompous one pronouncing me a "perfect husband and father" or some such nonsense.It's true that whenever my editor contacts me to say: new book going to press, if you want to change your bio, do it now I hesitate for about five minutes. For those five minutes I think of witty things I could maybe put in my bio. It takes about five minutes for this urge to pass, and then I email back and say: bio is okay as it stands.Unfortunately some people took it at face value.
So, what do you all think? Do you like long acknowlegements, notes, and bios? Or do you ignore them?