Scar Girl (24 page)

Thanks also to the entire team at Egmont who was so wonderfully supportive of me. This is bittersweet. By the time you read this, Egmont USA will have shuttered its doors. My time with Egmont was magical. My career as a writer would simply not have started without the hard and brilliant work of not only Jordan and Greg, but also of Andrea Cascardi, Margaret Coffee, Michelle Bayuk, and the entire Egmont team.

Thank you also to Jordan for the
Scar Girl
cover concept, Steve Scott for the design, and the lovely Egmont staffer Cassandra Baim for serving as the model.

Thanks to the entire team at Lerner, the new publisher of both
The Scar Boys
and
Scar Girl
, including Adam Lerner and Alix Reid. I feel fortunate that my work has landed in their skilled care.

Unlike
The Scar Boys
,
Scar Girl
was written on a deadline. This means that there were far fewer early readers. Thank you to my friend and fellow writer Nadine Vassallo and to my wonderful agent Sandra Bond for their feedback.

The parts of the book that deal with Johnny's amputation were informed by a series of conversations with my friend Pat Logan, a prostheticist. When Pat was in his early twenties, he lost his leg in a freak ATV accident. Rather than letting that incident define his life in a negative way, Pat made it define his life in a positive way. He now spends his time and industry in the service of other amputees, and he's one of my heroes. His insight and knowledge allowed me to make Johnny's experience more authentic, and I thank him.

As I did in
The Scar Boys
, I thank my former Woofing Cookies bandmates for their friendship and for our shared experience, and for allowing me to use the lyrics to “Johnny's Dead”—a song we all cowrote in the 1980s—at the end of the book.

A huge thank-you to booksellers and librarians everywhere for embracing
The Scar Boys
. Without that support, this book would not exist.

Thanks to my sons, Charlie and Luke, for putting up with Dad's insane travel schedule in support of his dream to be a writer, and a massive, never-ending, all encompassing thanks to Kristen Gilligan, my wife and partner in all crimes and misdemeanors, for the same. In addition to a lot of weekends watching our kids on her own, Kristen is always my first reader, one of my best editors, and, you know, I love her.

And of course, thanks to my extended network of family and friends for supporting me as you do. I'm one lucky dude.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Len Vlahos dropped out of NYU film school at the age of nineteen to go on the road with a touring punk/pop band called Woofing Cookies, which eventually became the backdrop for
The Scar Boys
. He, his wife, and two young sons live in Colorado, where they co-own and work at the Tattered Cover, one of America's leading indie bookstores. You can visit him online at
www.lenvlahos.com
and follow him on Twitter and Instagram
@LenVlahos
.