Special Edition with the Writers After Dark Crew!

I need to preface this post by saying that just a few years ago, I would have bragged that all my friends were "real"—in the sense that I had spent face-to-face time with every single one of them at some point in my life, whether we currently lived anywhere near each other or not. I couldn't understand how anyone could become friends—true friends—over the internet.

And then I met SK Anthony . . . online, when she hired me to edit her first novel, Kinetic. Much like the insta-love in the awful romance novels we despise, our friendship was solidified within the first conversation. We pretty much went from strangers to BFFs within an hour, it seems, and it's a friendship that's only grown stronger over the few short years we've known each other. In fact, this week we celebrated three years of friendship, and true to form, we celebrated the one-year anniversary of our two-year anniversary (go with it . . . it makes sense to us) when we finally got to meet in person last summer.

SK and me, on our "date" where we laughed for 12 hours straight. #truestory

So I suppose it should have been no surprise to me that my friendship with Raymond Esposito turned out much the same. We met on Goodreads while harassing conversing with a bunch of whiny people on one of the discussion boards and decided we had way too much fun being logical with people who were . . . well, they were kind of uptight, for the most part. Our combined superpower there was that we never took ourselves too seriously, and it drove the uptight people crazy. We did meet some pretty fun people there, too, but our own friendship extended to outside of Goodreads and eventually to a working relationship when Raymond asked me to re-edit the first two books of his Creepers series. 

I ended up introducing him to SK, and a magical three-way friendship was cemented and just kept getting better and better. A few short years later, here we are: we've done a lot of book work together, we've chatted countless hours online, we've exchanged some of the strangest Christmas gifts ever, and we finally all met up in person this spring when Raymond had the crazy idea in January that he was going to throw himself a 50th birthday party and house us for five days. His thought was that either we'd emerge the best of friends, or we'd never want to speak to each other again.

It's hard to imagine how this works, but the entire five days had the feel of people who had known each other our entire lives, and who could live quite comfortably together indefinitely. Amazing. And because I happened to be in the right place at the right time, I got to be their first real, live, in-person guest on Writers After Dark. We could not pass up the opportunity to film while we were all in the same house, and I'm so glad we made the time to do it, though I will say that most of the footage does not make us look nearly as happy as we were. I think SK and Raymond figured twelve minutes of us just laughing over each other wasn't what most people would bother to watch, so here's what's left after the edits. 

Enjoy their interview, ignore that we were squished together and couldn't move, and pretend we all actually know what we're talking about in Episode 6 of Writers After Dark: Me Can Self-Edit.