Chris came into my life at Viable Paradise 2009, and you know, he was a guy I knew. It wasn't until he came back into my life about 5 years later that we became close.
While we were both attending Paradise Lost, a writing retreat in San Antonio, that's when we started to bond. I was SO SICK. Like an idiot, I decided to travel with a cold and turned it into bronchitis. Chris took really good care of me, making sure I made it to the drugstore, taking the time to walk with me as I lagged behind the group. He was the quintessential good guy.
He, George Galuschak, and I started hanging out online once a week, to talk about our writing projects. Chris and I went with Debbie Goelz to the San Francisco Writers conference to pitch agents, and again to the Writer's Digest conference with George and Miranda Suri. On the New York trip, we hooked up with Chia Evers again, and shortly after that, The Unreliable Narrators podcast started, because we wanted to put something positive out into the world. We did, with interviews Chris edited and produced. We also recorded E'ville, the radio show, together.
Chris was a supportive writing friend. He read all my manuscripts and returned insightful credits. Heck, when my first Klaereon book came out, he made me a monster truck ad for it, because it was a joke, I said I'd love to hear it, and he did it.
It was the great pleasure of my life to attend writing conferences with Chris. Together, we took the Writing Excuses cruise of Europe, Chris was one of the regulars at our Icon workshop, and we journeyed to Vancouver to the Surrey International Writers Conference. We went to a couple of World Cons together.
At one of those World Cons in Kansas City, Chris and I kept ending up in pocket dimensions. I went into a space where I could see the convention floor, but couldn't get to it, because I was in the off limits space of the convention center. Chris ended up in an abandoned hotel lobby, because one of the downtown hotels had bought a competitor and hadn't remodeled the space yet. I jumped off a tram, but in an alternate timeline, there was no door for Chris, and he moved on down the road to the next stop and circled back to my dimension.
If only I had realized the other dimension was still greedy for him, I would have said something. I miss you, my friend. I miss you so much.