October 24, 2018– Being friends with an author has its perks; coffee shop visits, visits to bookstores together, talking books, and of course getting the inside track on what we’re working on (if you care) are the good things. Let’s talk about the downfalls to being friends with an author.
- We will put you in a book. Whether directly or indirectly, we will put you or a piece of you in a book. We can’t help it. Little personality quirks, funny superstitions, physical traits all have to come from somewhere and being an author means that we choose those who we are closest to write about. Also, if you piss us off, we will kill you…figuratively.
- We are forgetful. Yes, we are a forgetful bunch, but not because we mean to be, but because we remember the important things. We may forget the anniversary of our friendship, but we’ll never forget that time when we made you laugh so hard that you spit your drink out. We won’t forget the sparkle in your eye when you tell a joke, but we will forget that you butchered the punchline. We will forget what you were wearing last week to the movies, but we won’t forget the single tear we saw you shed when the main character died. We can’t remember everything, but we never forget the important things.
- We are scattered. We change directions from one second to the next and sometimes the conversations we have with the characters in our head come out when we’re talking to you. Our desks are a mess, we switch ideas in the middle of things, we are absent-minded and can never seem to find a pen. We lose things including our train of thought, but we are among the most disciplined people you will ever come across; how could we ever finish writing multiple novels if we weren’t? How could we possibly sit our ass in the chair and not get up until we’re finished if we weren’t? We’re scattered and we’re apologetic for it. We can’t stop the noise in our head.
So, if you’re friends with an author, consider yourself fortunate, because we don’t have a lot of friends typically and we keep the ones we have, close. X LLB
