Pride & Prejudice is 200 Today!!!

Oh, Austen lovers around the globe are celebrating wildly today! Our wonderful Jane's "darling child," Pride and Prejudice, has its 200th birthday. In honor of the bicentenary, the Jane Austen Centre in Bath, England is hosting a live 12-hour Readathon of the novel, which will be broadcast worldwide throughout the day, starting at 11am GMT!

All of my fellow writers at Austen Authors are, likewise, celebrating (of course!!), and we're beginning a cool interactive writing event called "P&P: Readers Choice" on the blog. Like a Regency version of "Choose Your Own Adventure," the readers will get to vote on the direction of the storyline and a great many of us (myself included) will get to contribute to writing these scenes! The first installment will begin on Wednesday, and mine will be coming up at the end of April... I'm already excited about getting to write something historical (I don't get to do that often) with a scene involving Edward Bennet, aka #HotBennetBrother, as he is affectionately known on Twitter, LOL.

Also today, my friend Alyssa Goodnight is having a special P&P Blog Hop, and all of us involved have the chance to share on our own blogs something about how we came to read/love P&P. For me, it was an assigned novel in high-school English class my freshman year. Much like the experience my heroine Ellie had in According to Jane, when the copies of the classic novel were plopped onto the students' desks, I lifted up my copy of the book not knowing that reading it would change my life. Unlike Ellie, of course, I did not hear Jane's voice in my head giving me dating advice (which is unfortunate, as I would have benefitted greatly from her wisdom!), but reading that story made me see the world and its people anew. What insight Austen had into human nature and behavior!! I'm still more than a little awed by her work, even all these decades later...

And a big thank you to EVERYONE who's purchased a copy of my new digital romance, Pride, Prejudice and the Perfect Match! Thanks to you, it's been a Top 100 Best Seller on Amazon in both "Single Women's Fiction" and in "Humor." I'm not only thrilled, I'm so honored and grateful to you all!! On the subject of both P&P and my own novel, I'll be guest blogging on Fresh Fiction today, too. Given all of the Manti Te'o/online dating controversy as of late, a discussion of Internet romances (and how easy it is to misrepresent oneself online) is my topic! Hope some of you are able to pop by...

Anyone have any particularly good news to share? Fun plans for the week or month ahead? I'd love to hear. And, now, for Jane, let us raise our glasses in a toast to a brilliant author who's brought us such timeless characters and compelling stories!! Cheers, Miss Austen!