The Writing Challenge - Day Nineteen

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Today's challenge: Your writing buddy

Wow. If I had taken this challenge only 8 months earlier, today's would have been a sad tale of a lone wolf author who was forced to survive the harsh world on her own, hunting down the review bunnies and surviving on the scraps of editing tips thrown to her by those passing by on the internet...
Okay, not totally.... But almost!.... But that's not the point! The point is that I do have a writing buddy!

F.P. Spirit, hands down... or up... that always confuses me... is it down or up? How about sideways?
Anyway, F.P. Spirit is my writing buddy. He has, in a way, become my dad and mentor in the author/writer dimension. 
We met via a Facebook writing group in 2014 (HAS IT REALLY BEEN THAT LONG?!?). He needed an editor and I pointed him toward the one I used at the time. When he published his first book, a fantasy, I scrambled to review it (I didn't have many fantasy authors in my circles at the time and I was *cough* desperate for some fantasy to break up the western monotony... sorry! I'm not a huge fan of western.).
I was instantly hooked to his book series! I loved the color and depth of his story and his characters. I was ashamed of my own book, honestly, because I thought it paled in comparison.
He ended up reading my book as well and was equally impressed with it. In fact, if I remember correctly, he told me he was absolutely blown away by it.... but that was a couple of years ago, so I could be getting that wrong... cough, cough....
ANYWAY. After that, we kept talking. We became friends and started learning things together. Then we started bouncing ideas off each other, and we started challenging each other in our writing, and then he talked me into using Skype for meetings (always had Skype... never used it), and now I think we've shared too many of our writing secrets with each other, so we're basically in this two person cult now and will have to shred the other person's drafts if they try to leave said cult so that our sacred writing secrets are kept safe.... okay, not really, but you get the point.

I think my writing has improved 50 times more since becoming friends with F.P. Spirit. It has been great to have someone that I can bounce ideas off of, talk about author troubles to, and ask weird author questions in front of (and sometimes even get an answer!).
I honestly didn't know what I was missing out on when I was a lone wolf author. Having a writing buddy is awesome.
I only hope that I have provided as much "miracle grow" to our friendship as he has!

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