My Internet Walkie-Talkie Writing Buddy Is, In Fact, A Real Person
I have known Suzy Krause for nearly fifteen years. For ten of those years, she has been a trusted writing partner, the first to lay eyes on any words I put on the page—and I do the same for her. And just last month, I met her for the first time.
Fifteen years ago, the era of peak blogging, I stumbled on to itwalkedacrossmypillow.blogspot.com, my interest piqued by the intricate pen illustrations on Post-its that were featured in each entry. The writing matched the drawings: full of voice and delightful observations about everyday details. It was a refreshing reprieve from pigeon-toed fashionistas and mommy-bloggers whose houses were always prettier than mine. Suzy’s blog was like a story told over steaming coffee mugs in the corner of a sticky diner. It was raw and nostalgic, comfortable and real.
If I may interject here, I’m 99% sure it was me, Suzy, who found Sarah’s blog first (but maybe the fact that both of us remember it differently is simply because the act of discovering other people’s blogs back in that day was part of the fun and we both just remember that element of it. Online spaces were not yet the glutted marketplace they are now—it was a small community, where you could look around and easily find the people you knew you’d vibe with, and with a click you’d add them to your Google Reader and begin to follow their lives, collecting friends like a kid collects pretty rocks).
Her blog was called Reverie and it was mostly text-based, but there were these gorgeous photographs sometimes, too, taken with a real camera (as opposed to the ones on mine, which I took with a green flip phone). Her writing was beautiful and calming and I visited the website every morning as I drank my coffee. Like Sarah said, this form of blogging was so conversational and real that I felt like I knew her before we interacted on any level. But it wasn’t long before I started leaving comments. Love this post. Love your writing. We have so much in common!
Back in 2010, everyone had blog friends, and everyone was trying to grow their own blogs. We would leave comments for both purposes, and it was usually obvious what comments were meant for which. Thankfully, my comments to Suzy came across as sincere (they were!), and I found in her responses the same cheery tone and unique perspective that I’d learn to love in her writing. We started “talking” daily, comments and then emails, eventually following each other’s lives through Instagram.
And this felt like such a strange transition! With Instagram, Sarah’s pictures showed up right alongside my “real-life" friends. When her name appeared in my inbox, she felt just that much more tangible. It was proof of something I thought I knew, but which I guess I didn’t fully internalize. I think that sometimes, with the Internet, you don’t realize how much you don’t see the people you interact with as real human beings until it’s somehow proven to you that they are.
There was never any chance of us moving the conversation IRL. I lived in Denver and Suzy was in Regina, Saskatchewan. When I moved to New York City, the chances of us meeting in person were even less—yet our relationship grew. She emailed me one day and asked, “Are you writing a book?” It’s the sort of assumption that can be made in a well-developed relationship, two people who understand each other beyond what is overtly communicated. Because, of course, I was writing a book. By 2015, the publishing world was full of blog-to-book stories, and I never spoke to a literary agent who didn’t ask if I had thought of starting a blog.
When it became clear that we were on the same path, fumbling through first drafts and brainstorming ideas, Suzy and I switched to a walkie-talkie app called Voxer. Suddenly, she was a voice—one that sounded exactly like what I expected from reading it all those years. We made a plan to trade pages, set deadlines for ourselves, wrestled with the plot issues of both stories, fell in love with characters who, until then, had only been living in each other’s brains.
Another surreal transition! Reading each other’s blogs all those years granted us a look into each other’s lives, but writing novels together took things to the next level. There were now chapters of fiction with accompanying audio messages—this character was inspired by a real person; this scene was inspired by something that happened to me when I was a teenager; here’s the backstory about why I need to write this storyline… Sarah went from a stranger whose life I followed, to a verifiably real person in another country who I’d likely never meet, to someone who knew more about me than most people in my life. But the format was nothing like real life—Voxer allows you to leave 15-minute-max, un-editable voice memos. The back and forth was long-form, often rambling and disjointed. I loved it. Sarah’s messages were like a movie voice-over that accompanied me on grocery shopping trips and walks around my neighborhood; I listened to her working out her plot points, but I also listened to her working out and moving through her real life—from the mundane to the monumental. And she listened to me working out and moving through mine.
I’ve come to realize that something writers want is a witness. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t put our words and stories out there. We want to know that our stories matter, that we are seen. Maybe this is one of the reasons why this friendship became so important and special to both of us over the years? We communicated, yes, we wrote together, but also: We witnessed each other’s lives. We witnessed everything.
I remember the evening Suzy had completed a full draft. I’d seen chapters come to life, but she emailed it to me to read cover-to-cover, the complete experience of the novel she’d dreamed up. I rode the train to Washington Square Park with her book in-hand, planted myself on a concrete bench and fell into the story. I read until the park lights came on, until the whole city lit up around me, which was pretty fitting considering a good chunk of that book was set in NYC.
The first time someone reads your novel in its entirety is when it becomes a Real Book. It’s not the publishing, or the binding, or the cover—it’s the reader. So I’ve always thought of that night as when I became a novelist, and I’ve always thought of Sarah as the most integral part of that journey.
It’s blissful, being in the same writing space as a friend and co-writer. It’s harder, when the paths diverge, but friendship is still navigable. Suzy agented Valencia and Valentine; then she sold it. The pages that had once been only mine to hold on a park bench were bound between a beautiful cover and came to life for other readers. Then she sold Sorry I Missed You, and started working on her third book.
My first book didn’t get a cover, didn’t sell, didn’t catch the eye of an agent. Along the way, Suzy never stopped encouraging me. What became clear was how our relationship had expanded far beyond the bounds of career; she knew about my family, she listened to my heartbreak as we left New York, she was there when my husband started a business, when we decided to travel the world for a bit, when we finally landed in the mountains in Colorado. We’d always imagined our books would bring us together in person. I didn’t have a book, but I did have an incredibly reliable, supportive friend, inside my phone or on my computer screen.
This is the cruel thing about the publishing world: It has more to do with luck and timing than anything. If it had to do only with merit or hustle, the landscape would be vastly different. I think it’s very common for writer friends to drift apart as this elusive publishing luck lands, inexplicably, on one but not the other (yet) and they have to figure out how to celebrate together, how to navigate disappointments, how to encourage without sounding trite or disingenuous, how to exist in a very competitive industry without becoming competitive in their relationship. It’s a microcosm of any friendship, I guess. Did we do it perfectly? Probably not, but we’re here writing this essay together, so that means we did it, anyway, and I feel pretty proud of us for that.
And thankful to have found a friend who is willing to try so hard. Those, in the publishing world and in the real world, are so, so rare.
As Suzy prepared to publish I Think We’ve Been Here Before, writing, for me, had become harder. It felt lonely being “left behind,” so to speak, and I was stuck. If I wasn’t going to publish my book in the same way Suzy could launch her career, what could I do instead? So I finished an MFA in Paris. I started writing criticism and about literary events for a local magazine. I co-launched a reading series, Reading Den, with my friend, Adam Vitcavage, bringing together writers from all around Colorado, and eventually, the country. I widened the circle of what writing could be, also widening the circle of other writers I now know, and in turn, I found my own sense of accomplishment—and renewed confidence in calling myself a writer.
I had never been present, physically, for any of the rest of Sarah’s life—I couldn’t bring her casseroles when her babies were born or a coffee on a particularly exhausting day, so it wasn’t strange that I watched her give her final MFA reading online. But it did start to feel weird, at some point, that I wasn’t there for these things. When she started Reading Den, it was quite a big deal, actually—a major literary event that drew such attention and acclaim. She’d send messages on her way to and from the venue, and I told her how proud I was of all she’d accomplished, but I really wished I could come support her in person.
There’s a lot of talk about paths that diverge. Sometimes those paths do cross again. Had I published a book, the likelihood of my meeting Suzy still would have been small. There wouldn’t have been cause for an author from Regina to meet an author from Denver, not under usual circumstances. However, hosting a reading series that invites authors from everywhere…
Reading Den returned for its second season just last month. We created the roster at the end of 2024, just after Suzy had been awarded a grant from the Sask Writers Guild. The grant would fund her trip to Denver to promote her new book at Reading Den and another salon we planned in her honor at the Center for the Arts in Evergreen, my hometown. The day before the readings, I nervously strutted into DIA with a homemade sign sporting Suzy’s name in sparkly red letters. I wondered if I would recognize her from photos. If her voice would sound the same in person as it did on Voxer. Walking in my ballet flats at a measly 5’3”, it occurred to me that she might be a lot taller than I am.
Spoiler: I am a bit taller than Sarah, and it was a weird thing to realize—not that our heights were different but that, once again, she’d been a real person this whole time! A person who took up actual space in the actual world! You’d think I’d have really, truly understood that by the time I was booking my flights to Denver with every intention of staying in her guest bedroom for three nights, but it was still shocking to see her standing there in the airport, looking exactly like herself but also—three dimensional? To be able to hug her?
Honestly? It was a little hard to look Suzy in the eye at first (and not just because she was so much taller than I am). We had crossed into a new dimension, a physical one, and it was almost like my brain and body separated for a minute. And then there was the rhythm of conversation. I could say something, in a few sentences, not ten-minutes worth of monologue, and she would immediately respond. I didn’t have to wait thirty minutes for a message notification to pop up on my phone. Her thoughts were there, in real time. Which was how I realized, the experience was different, but the person wasn’t. She was the same person I’d always known. Now, I could watch the face she made when she did the little laugh that sometimes ends her sentences. I could see that she does really smile as much as her voice makes it sound.
I agree—it was weird! And I said so, probably fifty times. I think the weirdest thing was how self-conscious and worried I felt. I was, technically, meeting Sarah for the first time. What if she didn’t like me in person? Her first [virtual] impression of me was a very curated one—my blog, my words, my pictures. Yes, we’d spent years witnessing each other’s lives, but we’d never actually been in each other’s lives. And here I was, about to go stay in her house, meet her kids and husband and dog, and it suddenly felt extremely precarious. Over a decade of friendship: Could it withstand in-person, real-time conversation?
Thankfully, it was like Sarah said: After I was able to get my brain to catch up to the fact that Real Sarah and Voxer Sarah were the same person, I relaxed—and had a lot of fun. And then, the weird thing was how normal and natural it felt. She drove me around and pointed out the places I’d spent years hearing about, and while it filled in the visual gaps for me, we had no catching up to do, no backstory or historical context to give.
By the time we made it downtown from the airport, we were doing the things friends do: we ordered tacos for lunch, stopped for too many iced coffees. We went antiquing and thrifting and laughed together at a hilarious encounter with a shop owner. We basked in the sun and took in some art. We sat on the couch with wine and stories that had somehow not yet been shared.
I also finally got to attend Reading Den! I know that this was technically “the reason” I went to Denver in the first place, but in my mind it was less about me reading and more about me witnessing this amazing thing my friend built. It’s one thing to have someone tell you what they’ve accomplished and another to see it for yourself. To see Sarah flitting through the room, greeting her readers and regulars, casually taking the stage. It was absolutely lovely to feel proud of her in person.
Our pace held the sense of surreality. We rushed from event to event, as if we had to make up for more than a decade’s worth of would-have-been coffee dates and celebratory champagne toasts. I introduced a great author behind Reading Den’s microphone; led a conversation with a lovely storyteller on stage at Center for the Arts, each of us playing the roles we’d fallen into on those diverged paths. But our lives weren’t separate at all. I spent the week, side-by-side, with my real life friend. You don’t have to know someone in “real life” for them to be your writing partner, but the luckiest friendships are when someone knows all of you, on the page and off.
