It's a Jen Thing...

I have met my soulmate. For an odd duck like me, that's not easy to do. I march to the beat of my own drummer and I have a weird sense of humor that can come off as rude if you don't get where I'm coming from and my world, geographically speaking, is pretty small. I live 12 minutes from where I work. I work for my husband and we have three employees. I spend time once a month with 30-odd other writers, six of whom are some of my closest friends.

And that's about it. I travel occasionally, like to the conference I attended last October, but I'm not the personality that jumps right into a group of people and charms them. I hang back, I don't talk much, I listen, I wait for invitations. It gets lonely sometimes.

But.

I recently switched online chat groups. Not because I didn't like the ladies I was hanging out with. I did. A lot. But one gal lives in Germany and her kids were getting home from school when I was just getting online, so rightfully so, it was time for her to be the mom and pay attention to her family. Her writing workday was essentially over. The other gal lives here in the states, but is more of a night owl and has various issues crop up and would just disappear on me, leaving me alone, which was not why I was in a chat room.

I had been getting emails randomly from another gal you might have heard of (Kristen Lamb) to join her band of merry creatives in a chat room for forty minute timed sprints. You can do anything during those forty minutes--write, edit, work your day job, exercise, clean house, whatever--and then come back and report your productivity, chat for a few, and then get back into another forty minute sprint.

So I went. I lurked the first few times, because, hello, nervous newbie here. But eventually I started chatting and reporting and then wielding the timer. Getting to know the core group as well as those who are more sporadic visitors.

And I "met" Jenn.

We clicked. We share a sense of humor. We share a lot of similarities. For example, anyone who knows me, knows I don't go anywhere without a travel mug of tea. Well--she takes coffee with her everywhere she goes. We like the same music. We're both writers. We're close in age. We're both moms. Anyway, as I said, we clicked.

It's been great. Also, I've become a text-er. I mean, we don't text all day everyday like teenagers, but our interactions are not limited to the online chat. We share stuff outside of the 9-5 workday. My love of hockey rubbed off and she decided to watch a hockey game to see what it was all about. We even Facetimed while we watched and chatted for most of the time she was able to watch. (She's on the east coast where it was later and couldn't watch the whole thing.) While she's not watching playoffs like I am, she does ask about the results of the games she knows I'm following.

Awww...

It's just that, throughout my life, I've just had so few people with whom I've clicked that much and that quickly. It's a gift at this point in my life and I'm so thrilled to have found her.