All Hail the Writergirls!

Once a month, I get to meet with some writer friends.

As a mom to a preschooler, just the fact that I get to leave the house for a grown-up outing is already cause for celebration, but this is more than a girls' night out.  This is a writergirl night out.

Ostensibly, this is to discuss all things writing: what we're working on, what our plans are, how it's going. There's a smattering of business discussion, promotional and career strategy.  A soupcon of writing philosophy.  Some reviews of what we've read recently.

Then we discuss the good stuff.  Like hot guys, crazy people, inappropriate fuzzy touching and porn names.

I don't know what it says about me, but I tend to gravitate to writer friends who are brilliant, intelligent, and bent like safety pins. They also all have a fantastic sense of humor, not just in their writing, but in general. They are fascinating, sparkling, amazing people, and every single time, I swear, I laugh until tears run down my face.

Writing as a business can be brutal at best, soul-crushing at worst.  I think it's safe to say that most of the writers I know are introverts. We don't go running around drawing attention to ourselves in the best of times and tend to save a lot of our drama for the page. When things go awry, we isolate, running on the hamster wheel installed in our brains, inevitably taking a simple situation and epically turning it into a Technicolor extravaganza.

What we need to do is find other people who understand the insanity. Who aren't going to judge us or snap "get over it" when we obsess over "what did this rejection letter mean?" or cry over another author's snarky back-handed complaint or a bad review or whatever.  Who are going to pass the ice cream when the words aren't coming. Who are going to tell you about their travails, reminding us that we're not the only ones with problems.

To my Monday night writergirls…

Thank you for listening to my rants, for being there in ways I never expected and being people I can be as raunchy and wrong and utterly unlovable with, and who love me anyway.

Thank you for giving me the gentlest "what the hell are you thinking?" possible when my mental train jumps the rails and I start thinking that writing an entire novel in Tweets — in multiple POVs and Pig Latin! – is just a brilliant idea.

I'm the most me when I'm with you.

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