Going dark...

The hardest part of life is choosing. Choosing what to eat for dinner when the menu is filled with amazing food you have to try.

Choosing where to take your career when the world is filled with stories you want to write.

And choosing where to spend the 24 hours every writer gets a day.

This is my last post for MMM. I've loved my time here but I'm struggling to fit everything in, especially the most important part, the writing. :)

I know many of you struggle with the same dilemma, fitting in time for you and your own dreams.

Let me just leave you with one last story.

Once upon a time there was a girl who wanted to become a writer. Being very literal, she searched for a college degree that would lead her down the right path. Not finding that, she took the practical way out, and went to work for the state after getting her degree.

Many years later, the girl found herself fighting breast cancer. While she sat and waited for doctors, and tests, and chemo, and radiation, she read. As she read, the stories she'd been carrying around for years started to bubble up. The stories she would write, someday.

The girl made a decision. Since someday wasn't looking too promising, she sat at her little kitchen table and wrote. Then she sent out those two essays and sold them to the world.

Then she started again.

That was 2007, in 2012, my first book was published and in 2014, Guidebook to Murder hit the NYT list.

Make today your someday.

Much love,
Lynn

Virtual friends, real and imagined.

When I was in first grade, I met Zandy. She lived two streets away from me and we were best friends. We had sleepovers, rode our bikes together, and went to the corner store together for penny candy. Yep, I’m telling my age here.

Zandy and I swore we’d be friends forever, but then my mom moved the family from the suburban neighborhood I loved to a farm on forty acres. No kids my age lived within a full square mile, even if my mom would have allowed me to ride my bike that far.

Today, my friendships are cemented virtually.  I get to meet people on line and have them turn into my besties. Laura Bradford is one of those people I met on line. She was part of The Good Girls Kill for Money blog and I won a book Laura had as a giveaway. Instead of her mailing the book, we agreed to meet for lunch. And our friendship was born.

Now that she lives four or five states over, we’ve kept in touch through email, Facebook, the occasional phone call and annual face to face meet ups. And when we do get together, it’s like no time has passed.

I’ve lost track of Zandy, but just last year, a friend from high school found me on Facebook. Brad was the goofy kid who loved life and loved to laugh. We were band kids. We were all Tolkien geeks, believing that the world followed the same rules for good and evil. It was great catching up with him but seeing him as an adult? It’s kind of crazy.

I’ve met many people (virtually) in the last few years that when we finally meet in person, it’s like we’ve been friends forever. For me, I’m loving the social part of the social media part of being a writer. Maybe that’s why I’m so comfortable writing about my imaginary friends who live in South Cove. I’m used to not meeting real people except on my computer. Who’s to say my made up worlds aren’t as real as the internet one I visit daily?

Have you developed friendships on the internet?