Acknowledgements
Writing and publishing Summer Rain was a five-year process, from start to finish. I owe huge thanks to a bunch of people who helped in many different ways:
- Ray Miller - thanks for the countless discussions, conversations, late night calls, and other general support during the writing of this book. Also thanks for the endless Death Metal research, countless free demos and zines, and being one of the main reasons I even started writing down this shit in the first place.
- Larry Falli - thank you for the friendship, support, unofficial counsel, and for helping me print this thing on that piece of shit printer of yours that printed two pages an hour and had a ten-page printer tray, just so I could bring the first draft to the Library of Congress.
- Andrea Donderi - you probably read the early drafts of this thing at least five times, and were the main instigator in the "Great Amy Merge of 99", which made the book ten times better.
- Marie Mundaca - thanks for the place where I wrote most of the final draft in 99, along with taking the back cover picture of me in front of the Seinfeld restaurant, plus the company of my two feline writing assistants.
- Dave Gulbransen - thank you for taking the photos, which are still used on this web site, and more importantly, were used for the cover of the first two versions.
- Thank you to the Indiana University Office of the Bursar (I never thought I'd say that) for their research assistance. Also many thanks to the two wonderful books on the subject, Indiana University: Midwestern Pioneer, by Thomas D. Clark and Indiana University: A Pictorial History, by Dorothy C. Collins and Cecil K. Byrd.
- Thanks to Mark Krenz and everyone at http://www.bloomingpedia.org for the constant source of Bloomington nostalgia that prevented me from throwing this whole thing in a furnace a long time ago.
- Tom Sample - many thanks for giving me a place to crash in 1995 when I was working on the book, a loan in 1992 for my apartment deposit, and many, many insane times cruising around hillbillydom in my beat up Camaro. Green hell!
There were also a bunch of people who helped in the sense that they were part of my summer in 1992. The book is fiction, but it's also creative nonfiction, and even though I changed names and places and events and everything else, there are a lot of people who were "in" the book, or people that didn't make the cut because the book was too damn long already. So here's a list. (I'm not confirming or denying who was in the book though, because I don't want to get sued.)
- Jennifer Warf - thanks for starting the fountain gatherings back in 1991. You weren't around for most of 1992, but without your idea, that central meeting place never would have happened.
- Sid Sowder - thanks for dragging me into WQAX and the whole VAX debacle. Let's never edit any DCL again, though.
- Bill Perry, Aaron Renn, and all of the UCS people I worked with back in the early 90s.
- Mike Whybark - we didn't know each other back then, but we've shot the shit about the old days in B-ton enough that I should mention you here.
- Robin Knabel, Andy Morrison, Mindy McKaig, Brian Smith, Nisa Janek, Erika Hopper, Julius Cooper, Alison Bachman, Tara Culbertson, Chris Hagen, Angie Cummins, and Joe McKenna.
A couple of people who were in the book or were good friends in Bloomington aren't here anymore, and deserve huge thanks. Those include Tom Donohue (provider of all of my CD needs back when people listened to music on CDs), Chuck Stringer (who reviewed all of my stories back then and encouraged me greatly when I was getting started as a writer), and Pete Steele (who I never met, but who I did interview on the air, which is included in the book.)
Many, many thanks to Sarah Miller for putting up with my shit on a daily basis.
No thanks to Evergreen Ford in Issaquah.
