Writing Dedications

Edward Docx on writing the toughest part of a novel: The Dedication.

[. . .] To whom, then? And how do you say it? It’s an almost impossible choice for, aside from the chosen one, every person you hold dear is going to be disappointed. Put it another way: writing a dedication to a novel is a bit like composing an email to your closest friends and family, explaining that you don’t like them as much as you have been pretending, hitting “send all” and cc-ing the rest of the world. Where to start? [. . .]

The piece lists quite a few dedications but strangely omits the Wodehouse classic from The Heart of a Goof:

To my daughter Leonora without whose never-failing sympathy and encouragement this book would have been finished in half the time.

And it makes no mention of this singular dedication by Tom Holt to his mother from Here Comes the Sun.

Penniless Writers: Ink Scrawl Nugget 19

Read this wonderfully quirky dedication by Tom Holt in his Here Comes the Sun.

For
MY MOTHER
But for whose tireless encouragement
And selfless dedication to the furtherance
of my writing career
(To the neglect and detriment of her own prodigious talent
as a crime writer)
I would now be the son and heir of a bestselling authoress
Instead of just another
Penniless
Author

Funny? Yes. But I am sure most authors would rather have rich parents then live on a mere pittance. If you feel that all authors make loads of money, that's because we get to read only about fat advances and huge royalties that a few authors manage to earn. Most writers, as this piece in The Independent says, struggle to earn a pittance.

More on dedications here. You will find D’Israeli’s take on book dedications from his Curiosities of Literature here.
Want to test your knowledge of Book Dedications? Take this quiz.

More nuggets from Tom Holt's works: The Pursuit of Happiness & True Reason for the Trojan War.

The Pursuit of Happiness: Ink Scrawl Nugget 18

God's Happiness

[. . .] It may be that God pursues happiness, but only with a flyswat or a rolled-up newspaper firmly grasped in one hand. And as for His own happiness, just think about it, will you? Poor guy's omnipresent, never gets a moment's peace, lives His life entirely for others. You ever heard He's got a hobby? Collects stamps? Builds scale models of alternative universes out of matchsticks? Even His son was immaculately conceived. Even actuaries have more fun than that.

—From Only Human by Tom Holt

Here's another nugget from a Tom Holt book: True Reason for the Trojan War.

True Reason for the Trojan War: Ink Scrawl Nugget 15

Lessons Learned The Hard Way Number One: Don't Kidnap Helen of Troy

The wooden horse was basically a face-saving exercise, something to make it all look slightly more convincing to the outside world.

Within three months of Helen's arrival in Troy after her abduction by Prince Paris, there wasn't a square inch of original carpeting in the whole city. The entire workforce had been transferred from the sword-tempering and arrow-sharpening to curtain-making, and King Priam had mortgaged his empire and taken out a personal loan from the First Achaean Bank to pay for new three-piece suites in every room in his gigantic palace. It wasn't Achilles or the wrath of the gods or the curse of Dardanus that did for Troy or the Hundred Gates; it was sheer bloody havoc wrought on the Trojan economy by a determined home-maker with a Liberty catalogue and a Gold AmEx card.

The reason that the siege of Troy took so long was simple. Once King Menelaus had got used to being able to wipe his hands on the towels and smoke in the living-room again, it took the concentrated moral pressure of three continents ten years to persuade him to take her back.

—From Tom Holt's Faust Among Equals