Pardon us while we take a moment to squee. But we’ve reached a milestone at Writer Unboxed. Today WU turns two!

I clearly remember the birth of Writer Unboxed. Therese and I are writers by trade, but aspiring novelists by vocation. We’d been kicking around the idea of unboxed fiction for a long time, admiring writers who took risks, and books that made us go “wow, wish I wrote/thought/dreamed of that.” We were both ready to take our fiction to the next level.

We’d also made friends and connections during our journey, and we thought it’d be fun to share what we’d learned about the industry with other aspiring novelists. I can’t remember which one of us said, “hey, let’s start a blog,” but we both thought it a terrific idea.

I laugh about our naivety now. We’d hooked up with a Blogger platform and after painful forays learning HTML and templates and so forth, we launched WU. Our first month I think we had something like 20 pageviews. Half of those were spam. We were thrilled anyway.

Therese and I make our livings interviewing people, and so we thought, hey, let’s interview novelists and publishing professionals, and ask them the questions writers really want asked. Since our modest start, we’ve interviewed over 50 writers, editors, agents, and other key people in the world of fiction. We’ve learned a lot from them, and we hope you have too.

Therese and I are also mindful that readers might get sick of reading us blah, blah blah every day, so we’ve been lucky to have an amazing array of contributors give their perspectives on the crazy world of writing fiction. We love the opportunity to bring fresh voices to WU, and we’ll keep doing so in the months to come.

Thank you for being a part of WU. We hope you’ll stick around while we turn three.

Kathleen Bolton is co-founder of Writer Unboxed. She has written two novels under the pseudonym Cassidy Calloway: Confessions of a First Daughter, and Secrets of a First Daughter--both books in a YA series about the misadventures of the U.S. President's teen-aged daughter, published by HarperCollins.
Kathleen Bolton
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