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Tribute to an Online Friendship R.I.P.

Posted at 12:31 pm by Mary J. McCoy-Dressel, on March 25, 2012

It’s Sunday again and time for another Stream of Consciousness five minute brain dump. Fadra, our host, has been giving us prompts to work with. I love that she does this because some Sundays, I honestlycan’t come up with a brain dump, at least not a five minute dump. Ask me on a week day or Saturday and I might be able to write a brain dump.

I love the prompt for today which asks the question about what we won’t write about in our blogs. I can write about this, but today I am choosing another topic. Read on to see what my choice is today.

Last night before shutting down my laptop for the night, I remembered I wanted to check out a friend’s Facebook page to see why I haven’t read anything about his new books or goings on in his life. When I met him through Facebook three or four years ago, his author page said he had published over forty books. I thought that was marvelous, and I could learn a lot from someone who published that many books. It’s true, I learned a lot from him. One thing I took away from our online friendship was how he inspired so many people. How he could tell one-liner, hilarious jokes. He always made me laugh. I learned about the many different stories he wrote. One of his novel series was about a heroine named Chloe, called the Chloe Files, and he always left excerpts about her escapades. She seemed real, and to many people who read her, she was real. Horror was a biggie for Howard, yet, he wrote children’s books, too, in the horror genre, on their level. He also wrote westerns under a pen name, using his middle name as the pen name for that genre.

I even considered asking my school if they’d consider having him come to talk about his books to our students in middle school. Kids can’t get enough of the books he writes. Or, I should say, wrote. I learned last night he passed away. My heart sank. No, I never met him personally, but he was a terrific person, both as a man and as an author. He left behind a loving wife and a family who loved him. He meant so much to his author friends, as well, me being one of them. He passed away in January. This is March and I just found out and I feel awful. It’s been some time now that I kept wondering why I never saw his daily posts. But, I would get distracted and forgot to go to his page. A lesson learned: Don’t put off till tomorrow what you can do today. My heart is saddened. Rest in Peace Howard/Lance Hopkins. You will be missed. Links to his work are included below.