Happy Birthday Blog, and Jane Austen!!

Quite by chance, I just realised my blog is 2 years old today and, via an Act of Google, I discovered it is 235 years since the birth of Jane Austen. Permission to say 'O.M.G.'?  I hadn't a clue. I set up my writing blog on Jane Austen's birthday. How perfect is that? 

So... since my first blog post, when I worried about agents, and talked about the 'tricky middle bit' in public for the first time, what has happened? 


Well, from a personal perspective: my husband was made redundant and I had to learn how to get 16 meals from a chicken; my dad got an aneurysm and had to go through endless operations, and a coma, to be with us this Christmas; I developed a sunlight allergy that kept me housebound for months, and I made stacks of chums online, who helped me through all this. BUT... None of the random trials held me back, so if you've been hit by the recession and are putting off being a writer until conditions improve... DON'T. Here's what I've accomplished in an 'impossible' market....

From a writing, blogging, and micro-blogging perspective... we are not in Kansas any more, my friends. It has been a WHIRLWIND since this day two years ago!

• Wrote another novel
• Edited the first
• Was published in Poetry Against Cancer
• Was published in The Times and The Telegraph (my tweets!) and mentioned in the Wall Street Journal
• Was published in Lori Gama's Become a Twitter Pro in 20 Days
• Was approached by literary scouts, agents and publishers
• Decided to self publish (watch this space. It's a trickier process than anticipated, and harder to set a deadline on than anything I can imagine, but my first novel will be out early in the 2011).
• Was approached by a UK publishing house and asked to write the foreword for a book that will be launched next month, called 140 Characters. 
• Wrote my first article for Writing Magazine (the magazine to which I was referring in my very first post). A HUGE moment for me. Will be out next month in the UK. Subscribe!
• Have been approached with increasing frequency to write all manner of things next year.
• Won Ms Twitter UK contest in 2009
• Finalist in Shorty Awards 2010
• Ms LitChat 2009
• Blogger Blog of Note awarded for my new blog
• Was Follow Fridayed twice, and given a quote for my site by Stephen Fry
• Wrote the first half of a third book
• Became one of the top 5 most influential women on Twitter in my country
• Became one of the top 100 most influential women on Twitter IN THE WORLD!
• Set up my own shop for writers! (US version is here)

and... I haven't told anyone this yet, but it seems a good enough opportunity. You know Groupon? The fastest growing site on the web? The one that Google tried to take over? I'm now an official blogger for them. I've gone pro! I'll post back here once my page is up.

What an AWESOME couple of years. Thank you so much to everyone who's followed me, here or on Twitter, Facebook etc. Please spread the word about my blog and I'll re-invigorate it with wonderful writerly things for you all. And... please leave a comment below. I know it's trendier now just to skip back to Twitter and DM me, but there's something so very lovely about blog comments.

Thanks for everything.

Rebecca (Word Nerd)

xxx