Guest Blogger - Lori Handeland

The Playfriends are pleased to welcome good friend Lori Handeland back to the blog. She's kicking off a brand new series today and we're all a'twitter waiting to hear about it. Make some room on the jungle gym for her. Take it away, Lori...

One of the best things about being a writer are the friends you make in the business. Once your life is consumed by the writing bug only others who are consumed by it can understand. I do have other friends—Mom friends (moms of my son’s friends, or moms I’ve met through school and sports functions), high school friends, family friends—but I can’t talk to them about writing. They don’t get it, and they don’t need to.

I have a group of writing friends I meet once a month for breakfast. I count the days every month. Several hours of chatting about writing after doing it in silence for the rest of the month is heaven.

Every morning I have a group of writing friends I exchange e-mails with. All day long, I tally up the thing I will tell them tomorrow. These friends are all over the country—North Carolina, Delaware, Alabama, Northern Wisconsin.

And when RWA comes around I can’t wait to get there and spend time with my long distance friends who I haven’t seen since the last RWA. But when we meet it’s as if we haven’t been apart since we “talk” every day. The bond of writing—fostered by the internet—runs deep.

I still remember years and years ago when I met one of my writing friends for the very first time (LJ!). We hugged and sat down and started chatting and the people we were with said, “How long have you two known each other?” We laughed and said, “Just met.” But really we’d been pals for years online.

There’ve been several times in the past fifteen years I’ve been writing that I was ready to throw in the towel and quit. The only thing that kept me at it were my writing friends. Both their encouragement and the fun I had with them, neither of which I wanted to give up if I turned my back on this wonderful and agonizing career.

One of the themes I like to use in my writing is friendship. In my debut urban fantasy ANY GIVEN DOOMSDAY (out today!) the heroine, Elizabeth Phoenix has got problems. You see, the world is coming to an end and there are demons all over the place.

Liz discovers that the Grigori, the fallen angels of Biblical Legend mated with humans and produced a legion of supernatural creatures known as the Nephilim. They’ve been here since the beginning of time, wearing human faces but beneath they are all the monsters of legend—vampires, shape shifters and more. There’s a secret society that fights them and she’s just been put in charge of everyone.

Lucky for Liz, she’s got two great friends to help her. Jimmy Sanducci, a boy she met when they were foster children in a group home on Milwaukee’s south side. They fell in love at seventeen; he disappeared at eighteen. But now he’s back and right in the center of a huge mystery. Who killed their foster mother and why? Jimmy’s always had secrets and now Liz is discovering more about him than she ever wanted to know. She’s going to have to work with him to save the world, which is going to be difficult since she wants to both kill him and kiss him. But they have a past, one that has linked them for years and will continue to link them in the future.

And then there’s Megan Murphy. The wife of Liz’s former partner when she was on the police force, Megan now owns a cop bar where Liz works. Though Liz blames herself for her partner’s death, Megan doesn’t. Megan is a tough, smart, supportive friend. Liz wouldn’t have been able to go on without her.

Though I don’t have to worry about demons coming to kill me, I still value my friends as much as Liz does. And I believe that having such good friends allows me to accurately explore the relationship in my writing. When I read, I also gravitate to books about friendship.

How about you? Do you enjoy portrayals of friendship in novels? What’s your favorite set of friends in a novel you’ve read recently or not so recently?

One commenter will pick up an autographed copy of Any Given Doomsday, so be sure to post! You can also check out the prequel to Any Given Doomsday on her website - http://www.lorihandeland.com/!