Dedication
To the real Dirk Van Allen with many apologies
for unwittingly stealing his name
Writers are used to strange things happening to them. Those moments of serendipity when the story they are struggling with suddenly becomes clear thanks to a chance remark overheard, or the glimpse of a stranger's face on an everyday journey. From such things whole books are born. From them, too, characters spring to life, and for most writers those characters are almost real. Almost, but not quite. So imagine how startled I was when the hero of my book Empty Hearts contacted me on Facebook.
Of course it wasn't quite like that. I'm a writer, so I exaggerate! But it was pretty spooky all the same. You see nowadays most of my heroes have ordinary names like Matthew or Sean or Daniel, but for some reason I gave the hero in Empty Hearts a much more exotic name. I called him Dirk Van Allen. Because I wrote it a long time ago I don't remember where the name came from although I do remember the person I modelled him on (never to be revealed) and I remember too that he had a double-barrelled name, so I guess that was the trigger for Van Allen. My choice of Dirk, however, remains a complete mystery to me. So when the name Dirk Van Allen popped up on my Facebook page I was more than startled.
So was the real Dirk Van Allen. How he found my book I have no idea, but he wanted to know why I had used his name, and he had a point because it is unusual. Van Allen is unusual and so is Dirk, so marrying the two together for a fictional hero and then discovering the name belonged to someone after all was an almost unbelievable coincidence, so that is why I have dedicated the 3rd edition of Empty Hearts to the real Dirk Van Allen.
Written in the 1980s it is now a vintage romance that has stood the test of time sufficiently for a 3rd edition to be republished by Books We Love, in print and as an ebook, so the least I can do is acknowledge the success of a very unusual name. Thank you Dirk, and because you and I are now Facebook friends, I know your own romance was one of the great ones, so this is in memory of your wonderful Lanny too.
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