No, not that kind, you sicko. Or not, who am I to judge? Anyway.
Today I’m flying to LA see one of my BFFs, Eden Bradley. I remember the first time I met Eden. It was at an RWA conference in Atlanta, about 2.5 years ago. She’d just gotten off a red-eye flight with Jax, gone straight to meet a bunch of Divas for breakfast and I hated them a little for looking so damn gorgeous after such a long trip! But still, I loved them right away and to this day consider both those girls two of my very best friends.

So tomorrow I’m going to fly to LA to visit Eden. She’s gone through some major life transitions recently and I need to go see her and make sure she’s okay, even though I know she is—I still need to check on things; I’m very controlling that way.

The minute I met Eden I knew we would be amazing friends and I wasn’t wrong. Now, she’s like a sister to me, and we’re even getting matching tattoos on our wrists. Sometimes I think how strange it is that we met on an internet writing site. But then, I’ve met so many people via the internet whom I now consider some of my closest friends. Eden, Jax, Mel, all my NAS sisters…these are women I know I could go to whenever I needed a friend. We get each other; writers need these types of connections and it just wouldn’t be possible without the web. I tried a real-life writing group when I moved to Nevada and it was one of the most humiliating, discouraging experiences of my life. The web lets you find a home.

Often when I tell people about the relationships I’ve developed with people I’ve met online I get strange looks, as if such a thing was kind of insane. But the non-online people don’t get it. I have an online family and unless a person has experienced such a thing, they just don’t understand. But it is possible to develop deep, long-term relationships online. I know because I’ve done it.

Last night I was online with Karen and she was telling me about how she was chasing a cow out of her yard at 4 am with her puppy. Here I am, a total city girl, laughing my ass off because I’m currently living in the middle of nowhere and I totally could empathize with her cow story because it’s happened to me. And then we go on to discuss writing sex scenes and publishing and our kids and 90’s R&B. It’s awesome. It’s random. I love it. I work at home. This is a lot of my socialization and it saves me.

So tomorrow I go to L.A. and see Eden. I met her online and I can’t imagine not knowing her, or any of my other online friends. So the next time someone puts down meeting people online, just smile and feel sorry for them because they’ve never heard Karen’s cow story.

Cheers.