Happy Birthday to Us! (Gratefully celebrating 4 years of Boxing the Octopus)

This blog was born out of many hours of writerly conversation, countless cups of coffee, a shared love of reading, and mutual dedication to writing. In one of those conversations, I referred to the writing life as "boxing the octopus", and Colleen instantly clapped on: "That's the name of our blog." A few days later -- four years ago today -- she posted the first entry, Welcome to Boxing the Octopus: Your Guide to the World of Commercial Fiction:

We're glad you stopped by and hope you'll pop by often as Boxing the Octopus takes on your questions about the world of spinning lies -- we mean fiction -- for fun and profit. In the coming weeks, we'll be introducing ourselves, organizing helpful material, and giving you our take on staying sane and solvent as a novelist.

We two Founding Mothers eventually came up with this mission statement:

To encourage and inform emerging writers, support books and authors we love, dialogue with peers in the publishing biz, and reflect on a life and living made of books.

I think BoxOcto has made good progress toward these goals in the last four years -- and I might add, we've both managed to stay sane and solvent as the book biz went totally off the rails. We've added some terrific blog crewmates over the last year or so, and God bless them, but I want to take this opportunity to thank Colleen Thompson, my dear kindred spirit and respected colleague, for sharing this journey with me from the beginning. The day we met, Colleeny was doing a table signing at Border's. I was officing in the upstairs coffee shop because my plumbing was being repaired. It was one of the luckiest days of my life, professionally and personally.

Tomorrow and Friday, watch this space for BoxOcto's greatest hits. (And more holiday book recomendations!)