A significant birthday

I don’t remember the exact day when this blog began and since a trawl through the oldest posts didn’t really help my research, nor, it appears, does WordPress! But I do remember the circumstances. I had already been blogging for the best part of a year for a golf marketing company which I had found to be fun as well as lucrative. It had also whetted my appetite for blogging in general and given me the chance to see what other writers were doing with the medium,  and so when the contract came to an end, I suddenly found myself with the time – and a certain amount of expertise gleaned from my IT training job – to set up and run a blog of my own. Since then (early autumn 2007) this site has had a couple of face lifts (anyone recognise the old banner image for  The Landscape of Love?) and gained a few pages, but in essence it’s the same: a place to meet people and ‘talk’, mostly (but not always) about writing. And three years later here it is, with a post for pretty well every week that has passed.  

 Okay, I know that  ‘real bloggers’ do it every day, but three years still feels like a milestone worth celebrating, and as Twitter friends will know, I have decided to throw a party and invite a special guest who has agreed to come along on my now official birthday of September 7th.

It seems particularly appropriate that my guest is someone I know only through our shared thoughts and comments in online communities, although I guess his bodily self might have passed not too far from my door when attending the awarding of the Bristol Short Story Prize.   To add to his success in making the shortlist, he’s also just had a great  story broadcast in the Opening Lines series on Radio 4 and is creating a bit of a stir with the ‘slightly demented sequel to Pride and Prejudice’ (that’s just one of many possible descriptions!) which he’s writing, with his usual eye for marketing,  in twice weekly instalments.

If you haven’t guessed already, I’m still going to let you do the work to find out who I’m talking about. And please put Tuesday Sept 7^th in your diary!