Blog Tour, Day 13

… in which we take our campaign into potential hostile territory, Jane Travers’ Jane Obsessed with Jane blog. The clue is in the title. Of course, what Jane doesn’t know (until now) is that I stalked her. Well, not really. However, when I started serialising Mrs Darcy on the web, I set up a Twitter account called @RealMrsDarcy (it’s still there – follow her!), the purpose of which – well, I wasn’t really sure, but I knew it would be of some kind of use to me.

Anyway, in those days, instead of Chris Hamilton-Emery’s alien as its icon, the account had Dave Weaver’s slightly friendlier steampunk-ish Jane Austen image. I used this to hunt down other Twitter folk with Austenesque icons (surprisingly easy to do once Twitter starts offering you similar accounts to the ones you’ve already followed, and there are an amazing number of them out there). Some of them ignored @RealMrsDarcy (boo) and some of them followed back (hurrah) and one of the latter was Jane Travers, who at the time had an even more luridly doctored version of JA as her icon. Jane, incidentally, has gazillions of followers on Twitter and has recently masterminded a rather spiffy charity recipe anthology, Tweettreats.

I had no idea whether or not any of these people would take any notice of the automatic posts from the serialisation that I was feeding through the @RealMrsDarcy account (or indeed the occasional half-hearted attempts at tweeting in character that I was posting), until I started getting the odd RT from them as well as the occasional comment, which was worth its weight in – well, not gold, but some sort of information equivalent . And then Jane Travers posted this on her blog, which was another of those points where I began to wonder if I might be onto something – even if she did use the “guilty pleasure” phrase that I might have mentioned at the Willesden Herald yesterday 🙂 So, whether she likes it or not, she was one of the people that most definitely encouraged me to keep going.

Anyway, I thought it might be nice to drop in on her during my blog tour, and so it turned out to be, even if she did pretend to be a bit bolshie. I’m sure she’s a sweetie really.