Happy Writer’s Society: Friends You Haven’t Met

NOTE: I will be gone Mon-Wed of next week, so if I don't answer emails/tweets/comments that's why. I'm heading to Ohio to help my dear pirate Sara move to Utah! Yay! Road tripping FTW.

Today we get to hear from the hilariously, ridiculously awesome Carrie Harris, whose novel BAD TASTE IN BOYS comes out this summer. I love Carrie so much. She totally understands my weirdness. I get to finally meet her on Sunday, and I can't freaking wait. Ohio might explode with awesome, just so you're warned.

I remember feeling all neurotic about joining the book blogging world. Did people really want to read about how it hails golf balls when I get good publishing news, or about how I think merpires are infinitely sexier than vampires? (It’s the sloshing. Gotta love a good slosh.) Because I sure as heck don’t know anything WISE. People do not come to me for wisdom. They come to me because it makes them feel relatively normal. I’m happy and flattered to provide such a valuable service.

Anyway, it was a quite a surprise to me when I started making friends behind the blogging scenes. And I’m not talking the “Hey, howya doing?” kind of friend. I’m talking the kind of person with which you have long, drawn out conversations, the person who miraculously GETS YOU, merpire fetish and all. The one who understands when you complain for the seven hundredth time about writing fears, deadline disasters, or the fact that your resident merpire won’t clean up after his baby pool and it’s RUINING YOUR CARPETING.

Ahem. Sorry. Got a little carried away there.

In a way, these friendships remind me of college, where you’re thrown into a dorm with a bunch of random people, and you’re expected to LIVE with them! They will see you in the morning when you’ve got bad hair and worse breath. They’ll know that your pajama tops don’t match your bottoms. But somehow, you end up staying up with these relative strangers until all hours of the night talking about life, the universe, and the relative sexiness of merpires (or whatever your fetish might happen to be). Your friendship develops fast and furious, cutting straight through the crap and getting on to something really honest.

My writer friends don’t see me in my pajamas, but I still tell them some things that I’d put a brave face on with other people. They’re always reminding me that I don’t have to amuse them all the time, because sometimes I feel that pressure. And it’s a relief to be able to just babble and not edit every single word. Because trust me. Behind the scenes? There’s editing going on. I don’t want to unintentionally say something I don’t mean. Even if it IS just a joke.

Those cosmic soul-level friends come and go. There are some people that I talked to daily a year ago, or two, that I now hear from about once a month if we’re lucky. And every time we write, we say, “Yep. We need to be better at keeping in touch.” But it gets harder and harder to keep up because the circle keeps growing. And that’s a good thing, not a bad one. Now, I’m not only talking to aspiring writers, but also to published ones, and librarians, and book bloggers. And seeing their names in my inbox brightens my day. It makes what would otherwise be a solitary profession into one heck of an awesomesauce community.

And it helps me to spread the merpire love, which sounds vaguely pervy, but hopefully you know what I mean.