Another big thank you goes out to Dr. Robert Zubrin, founder of the Mars Society and author of The Case for Mars, Entering Space, Mars On Earth, How to Live on Mars, and several other books. Dr. Zubrin is a wonderfully powerful and inspirational public speaker. When posed with a question about the manufacture of fuel on Mars, he came up with an answer in less than twenty minutes. Thanks again.
As the title implies, email communications are taking the place of postal letter writing. So, to gather inspiration through real-world communications for the book, I emailed a few friends in my social network, explained what I was about to attempt and asked them for input. The basis for one of the characters (Commander Tyler Cody) resulted from the input of Tom Smith. A great deal of input from my wife, Lou Ann Grover, went into the development of the characters of Emma Devlin and Penny Castle (and she promises me that someday she will give me a calendar like Emma sent to Brandon). In the character of Rich Devlin, there is more than a touch of the whimsical nature of my stepson, Jay Ball.
Plot development also got an assist from Lou Ann as well as John Stitzel, one of my co-workers. John suggested the book could use some international intrigue.
Once the base story was written, Lou Ann read through it and found typos and grammatical errors. Along the way, she began making suggestions for things like, ‘Sally smiled at Tom.’ Changing it to ‘Sally smiled warmly at Tom, dimples appearing at the corners of her mouth.’ Occasionally, she would pick up an entire paragraph, turn it inside out and shake it, just to get the bugs out. Then, she would highlight the changes she had made so I could view them and either accept or reject the suggested change. Being a man of at least average intelligence, I usually accepted her suggestions. Thus, I give credit and many thanks to her for proofreading and first-round editing. (Thanks bunches, sweetheart.)