Jane Smith's Birthday Pitch Party

Jane Smith is a writer/editor/researcher in the UK who writes a blog I follow via RSS feed -- How Publishing Really Works. It's a wonderful resource for writers -- links, book reviews, blog posts on writing and publishing, guest bloggers -- everything a writer could want in a single site (except, of course, the list of publishers dying to publish you; even there, though, there's a lot of great advice and insight).

Today is the first anniversary of Jane's blog, and she celebrated with a "Blog Birthday Pitch Party." Writers had the opportunity to pitch their own blogs, and about 60, including me, jumped in. I explored a lot of the linked blogs and found the diversity to be mind-boggling. Even among those 60 alone. It was great fun.

I was also proud of the fact that I figured out how to post the name of my blog in html so that a reader could link directly. Since I'm html-impaired, all it took was reading the comments and finding one where one writer was struggling to do exactly that and couldn't figure out what he was doing wrong. Jane gently pointed out the simple mistake he was making and fixed it. I plagiarized the instructions, substituting my own blog's name for my post, and voila! It worked!

I've now got four additional writing blogs that I'm following via RSS feed:

• Dan Powell Fiction Dan is a writer in the UK who used to be a teacher and is now writing full-time and caring for his two young sons full-time.
• Help! I Need a Publisher (And Maybe An Agent...?) Nicola Morgan is a self-described "crabbit old bat" who's published about 90 books.
• Isaac Espriu's Place Isaac is a writer who says he exists in sepia tones and vague descriptions and sometimes in brown shirts and broad smiles.
• Jonathan Pinnock's Write Stuff Jonathan runs a software company; writes fiction, non-fiction and poetry; creates some pretty cool cartoons; and also writes serious music. And he does this blog.

So Happy Birthday to Jane Smith's blog, and thanks for the opportunity to find these writers.