It is, as near as I can tell, 20 years today that I met my friend, RP partner, and cowriter Sarah EkstromPalmero (one of the good things about old friends is you get to keep using their maiden names decades after they’ve changed :))
I can actually pin this down to a day because I started playing TwoMoonsMUSH, the online text-based role play game based on ElfQuest, *immediately* after I got back from my first visit to Ireland. Sarah was one of the very first people I met. She was playing the book character Treestump, and I was irrationally terrified of interacting with the character. She played him very well and although I retained my general terror of interacting with book characters for some months before getting over it, it wasn’t because she was scary as a person.
Over the years we’ve written millions (literally millions) of words of role play (or fan fiction, if you wanna call it that) together. We’ve written books together. We’ve had fights and made up. We’ve worried people at Disneyland by discussing murder techniques (for books!). We’ve brought out the best (and no doubt the worst) in each other. We’ve seen each other through boyfriends and breakups, marriages and mischief. I doubt, twenty years ago, we *really* imagined we’d still be friends this far down the road, but I’m awfully glad we are.
Here’s to another twenty years, mon ami! <3