Okay.I want to hear the story of how you guys met on the SKMB. (again)
Everything looks magical, Lilly
Most people here assume Bryan and I met while working on the Halloween story. It's true that the first year I was a member here, I wrote in the story in the position immediately before Bryan's. In later years, I edited the story as well, but that's not how we met.
I joined the SKMB in 2009 with an ulterior motive: I was scouting for writing talent to publish for an electronic magazine that I was developing with a friend. We had decided that one of the magazine departments was to be a "tab" that championed unpublished or little-known writers. I like Stephen King novels, so I wondered if Mr. King had a website where writers spent any time.
Why, yes. And lo, once I had learned the ins and outs of the SKMB, I became a woman on a mission to find The Publishable. I plumbed the depths of the threads looking for posts that leaped off the page at me, and that's how I found Bryan.
Our relationship was really a professional one for five years. He'd send me something he'd written, I'd edit and make comments, one of us might mention the latest bestest tuna fish or pizza recipe we'd tried, and then we'd both say ciao for a couple of weeks. We didn't discuss personal things with each other, and there were often large chunks of time in which we had no contact at all. In those radio silence days, both of us were dealing separately with unexpected challenges, me in California and him in South Carolina.
After being incommunicado for a little over three years, life had changed. I'd moved back to Tennessee and was doing some contract writing while I figured out my next professional move. On a whim I PM'd him in May of 2014 with a two-liner: "Hey, Beaufort, what's the haps? Drop a note when you've time."
I got a response back in less than an hour.
And it was somehow different.
-I dunno: maybe the stars aligned for us for the first time, maybe we were finally ready to have real love enter our lives. Whatever the case, PMs and emails turned into live conversations over that summer. As we headed into fall, he said one day, "you know, we need to hang out in person. I'm going to nail you down to some dates for a visit to Beaufort."
I was gunshy about that. I'd never driven 500 miles to see a boy, but hey, what did I have to lose? As far as I was concerned, I was going to hang with my pal, drink a few beers, watch some good movies, and have some laughs together. It was really a drive to see my best friend...or so I thought.
We met that November.
And I was kissed within the first 15 minutes of my arrival.
I like to think it was my cunning use of ten-cent words and scintillating phraseology that turned his head, but that's not true. It was a bunch of things, but really it was having a lot of things in common and never becoming bored with each other. He makes me laugh, he picks magnolias and wildflowers for me, he cooks with me, he discusses literature and movies with me, he goes on day trips and picnics with me, he's silly with me, he debates with me...and even if he interrupts all the time, he still dazzles me and makes me feel grand.
I'm always with him, and he's always with me.
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