Loving Time

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eaders are often surprised to learn that it takes almost a year for a manuscript to travel from an author’s desk through its many stages of production until it finally becomes the book they’ve been waiting to buy. The process begins with editorial Close Encounters of the Third Kind, moves right along through many scheduling, marketing, promotion, and sales conferences. The pages themselves go through a complicated copyediting, production, book design, and printing process. Meanwhile, the difficult packaging decisions are made and realized, the cover design, cover art, and copy are completed.

A beautifully produced book is the author’s dearest wish. For fulfillment, it requires the work of dozens of gifted people. Bantam has an editorial, production, packaging, marketing, and promotion dream team. Thank you especially, the truly daring and visionary Publisher, Irwyn Applebaum, and world’s most challenging and supportive Associate Publisher—my brilliant editor—Kate Miciak. Thank you Managing Editor Susie West for production orchestration; Jamie Warren Youll for gorgeous cover designs, Betsy Hulsebosch for marketing, Barbara Burg for publicity, and my publicist, Susan Corcoran. Thank you Linda Biagi for foreign sales.

But, wait a minute! Before a single book can appear in a store, another powerful group of Bantam people have to go to
work: The Mighty Bantam Sales Force, which comprises the true, and not-often-enough-sung, heroes of publishing. This is the Force to which we authors pray every night: “May the Force be with me.” Thank you especially, Sally Johnson, Central District Manager, who said the magic words at the right moment, as well as Bantam Salesperson Cinda Van Deursen in the Eastern District; David Glenn and A. Scott LePine in the Western District. Thank you Telemarketers and those in Special Markets and National Accounts, and everybody else who gets those books out there and tells them not to come home again.

For help with the fictional Psychiatric Centre in
LOVING TIME
, and the field of psychiatry, thanks to Richard C. Friedman, M.D., gender expert, psychology professor, and consultant extraordinaire.

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aymond Cowles died of love on the evening of his thirty-eighth birthday. It happened on Sunday, October 31, after a long battle for his soul. As with many bitter conflicts, the end was abrupt and unexpected. In the same way as love had come on him unexpectedly and caught him by surprise after a lifetime of loneliness and despair, death crept up on Ray from behind without his even knowing that his release from ecstasy and anguish was at hand.

Since his twenties, Ray had flipped past the passages about love in the books he read. The movie versions of passion and lust seemed stupid and unbelievable to him. Love was supposed to happen to men like him when scantily dressed, big-breasted women flashed the look that said “I’ll do anything. Anything at all.”

Lorna had looked at him with those eyes; other women had, too. Many other women. Sometimes Raymond had even thought he’d seen it in the eyes of Dr. Treadwell. He never got it. Love to him was like a foreign language for which he had all the clues but couldn’t figure out the meaning. And he had learned to live without it as his own personal cross to bear, like a dyslexic who could never really read, or a patient with a terminal illness that wouldn’t go all the way and end his misery for a long, long time.